We're back from our yearly fall trip. We only had 6 guys, and we encountered truly lousy weather. The forecast was so good and the actual weather so bad, and so far off the forecast, it makes you wonder. We had rain every day. Cold every day. Wind most days. Does it get any better? The guys that don't wear glasses had knit caps on and the rain was just running off their noses.

I brought 2 cameras to take pictures of the fall colors, but we had no sunshine, so I didn't take any pictures.

We didn't hammer the walleyes, but we caught plenty and they were big and healthy. 18" and 19" fish were fairly commonplace. Of course the smallmouth bass were everywhere. We have a guy who hangs a 1/4 oz jig with a 3" orange or white twister tail, then he adds either a leech, minnow, or crawler below a beachball bobber. We call it the "Ball of Goodness". He only caught 1 walleye on that mess, but he did catch a bunch of smallies and lost an absolute monster smallie that jumped a couple of times before throwing his jig. Clearly a 20". Don't anyone ever tell me smallies are an intelligent, weary, tough to catch fish. We all caught them on everything we threw.

This trip we actually only caught a few fish under 15" or 16". Is this a sign of a couple of bad spawning year classes, or just superior fishermen targeting and catching some good sized fish?

As for the campers cleaning out the walleyes, not this week. Only saw 1 tent (poor guy), and didn't see any garbage either floating or up on shore. I bet a huge crew came in and cleaned the TFF up.