2010 numbers

I haven't tallied up the lures yet but I have the numbers for fish in the boat this year. The average size is pretty darn good. Here goes:


112 total from the Chip
5-----under 30"
14----30" to 35"
33-----35" to 40"
38-----40" to 45"
22-----45 to 50 inch

With the way July and August went I didn't think we would be even close to these numbers but September bailed us out. Also had some nice fish off of some other lakes including a few low fifty inch fish. All and all, some really good periods mixed in with some really tough times. I supose that's fishing.

Here are some of the top lures we caught fish on:

Ghosttails-16 fish
Cowgirls-14 fish
Pacemakers-6 fish
Supermodels-5 fish
Crazy D Tails-4
Bulldawgs-4
Stillwters-3
There were a bunch of lures with one or two fish on them so I wont list them all. There were a lot of Sucker caught fish this fall also. This info might not help anyone but it's interesting to see.

Are the numbers way down for Bulldogs this year?

Compared to last year the Bulldawg numbers are way down at least in my boat. Not sure why. There were long stretches where we didn't even have any fish follow artificial baits but we caught fish on suckers.

I wonder how many hours it took to catch all those fish?

Ty:

Just curious what the numbers (fish caught) were by month?
Overall the average size was pretty impressive. More than 53% of
fish tallied in your boat this year exceeded 40". On a side note...do
you see sucker availability being a problem next fall as well?

jkahler, we fished about 7 hours this year. Hour six was a little slow with only twenty caught.:) No clue on how many hours. I usually do between 120 and 140 trips but some of those are half day trips.

Chuck, basically the numbers were even for June, September, and October. About twenty five each month. We also had almost twenty in November. That tells you how bad July and August were. That heat killed the fishing.

As for the sucker availability next year........hopefully the bait dealers learned from their mistakes this year.

Hey Ty,

Thanks for the yearly stats - always very interesting. Are your topwater numbers down this year ? If so, any theories why ?

I noticed that I caught fewer fish this year on topwaters than I did the past three years despite throwing them about the same amount of time.

Thanks in advance.

I was just wondering what model Ghosttails you were using?

Our topwater fishing was a little slow for a couple reasons. For one, I kind of got stuck in a rut in June and early July with throwing bucktails only. Don't get me wrong I wouldn't go back and change anything. We caught the heck out of fish in June on Bucktails so there was no need to throw topwater. Second, usually August is a really good topwater time but the water temps were so high that the topwater fishing was a little slow. Made the topwater numbers go down a lot. Most of the fish caught on topwater were in late September when the water cooled down some.

Here's what you wrote about 2009. Any thoughts about the two season comparison? One observation for me is that for two years in a row, the suick bite has been very limited. What else you got?

Here are the totals for the year:

Total fish from the Chippewa Flowage: 133

fish under 30 inches: 4
fish 30 to 35 inches: 26
fish 35 to 40 inches: 43
fish 40 to 45 inches: 32
fish 45 to 50 inches: 27
fish 50 inches: 1

Lure totals:

Ghosttail: 23 fish
Pacemaker: 13 fish
Cowgirl: 13 fish
Bulldawg: 11 fish
Big Game: 6 fish
Musky Buster: 5 fish
Rough Runner: 4 fish
The rest were under 4 fish per bait

Looking back there were a few things that were odd about this year:

For one the Suick bite was really weird. I could get a lot of fish to follow them but only caught two on them.

The Creeper bite also was weird. We had a ton of action on creepers but only caught three on creepers. This may be because I don't fish late at night much.

The other thing that surprised me when tallying up the fish was that we only had six fish on Big Game baits. For most of June that's all we saw fish on.

And last but not least the main thing that surprised me was the Bulldawg bite. We caught more fish on Bulldawgs this year in the month of October than we have caught total in all the years I've fished out here. Normally we get one or none on Bulldawgs all fall. It's not because I don't throw them every year either. For the most part I would use them as a decoy because they only followed them.

Overall it's good to see the size range spread out so good on the Chip. There are a lot more big fish to go with the good fish coming up behind.

The low to mid forty inch fish are definitely the dominate size range this year compared to last. Most of the fish under forty inches were just under this year where last year there were a lot of mid thirty inch fish. The summer was so unpredictable this year because of the heat. That is the main difference I see.