Ice Fishing for Muskies Today! 11/17 Report

Gotcha! Well, it wasn't REALLY ice fishing but sure had some of those elements to it. I got out for an outing with my friend Patricia for a row trolling day on the water. She's been having some success on some of the smaller lakes but today we decided to get out and hit some big water looking for a real late fall trophy. So, ok, we're a little twisted and after even seeing whitecaps and two foot waves we launched her little rowboat and headed out to find the big girls. It's been a while since I thought to myself "maybe this wasn't such a great idea" but it didn't take long before we both realized that this was going to be a heck of a lot of effort and had to use extreme caution doing anything out on the water. There were some areas that we wanted to fish but literally could not put ourselves on those spots. Boat control was a huge issue even with both of us pulling on the oars. We made a couple long runs and tried some open water humps that we just blew right by. Found ciscos out in thirty foot water but most of them were pretty tight to the bottom. After making one last motor run up to a starting point we decided this would be our last shot as the wind got even stronger and we had a good bit of lake effect snow from Superior making things even more fun. I tried to not think of the song "Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" but it just kept popping in my head. No fish on that final run down to the boat landing so we figured we'd tempted Mother Nature enough and called it a day.
Tough to see in the photo but this was taken when we got behind some cover to set up for the final run. The reel and rod had a solid coating of ice over them and the line was completely iced up too. That was about the only time I dared take my hands off the oars to reach for a camera. In truth I'm not sure what we would have done if we would have hooked a fish out in that open water. My parka and bibs should be ice free in a couple days so I'll be back out there as soon as I can but I'll pass on doing the rowboat thing in these kind of conditions again for a while.