June 19, 2011 -- Father's Day -- On Leech Lake

Happy Father's Day to all the dads out there, especially my dad, who is the greatest dad a guy could ever hope to have! Thanks Dad.

This morning at 8:15 a.m. the temperature was 53 degrees, the sky was grey and overcast, the lake and the horizon blended together in a silvery-grey mist and the wind was calm; once again the flag lay limp against the pole and the water looked like glass. I could not see across the lake, it was simply a silver-grey expanse.

There has been a strange visitor in the yard this morning --a pigeon. Now, if I was in San Francisco, Minneapolis, or maybe even Bemidji, I wouldn't be surprised seeing a pigeon, but here on the shores of Leech Lake, that's very unusual. In fact, in the 10 years we've had our properties on Leech Lake, I had never seen a pigeon up here until today.

One other interesting aspect to this particular pigeon, it had a green band around its left leg and a blue band around its right leg, just above its feet. Maybe it's a homing pigeon that had lost its way. Anyway, the darn thing was eating the grass seed I just put down yesterday, so I had to shoo it away. But, it kept coming back, so eventually I just gave up chasing it away. At some point it will have its fill of grass seed.

Despite overcast skies and the threat of rain, I decided to fishing at 2:00 p.m. The temperature was 66 degrees, the wind was light at 5-8 mph out of the NE and the water temperature was 67.5 degrees.

I started fishing in 9-12 feet of water in front of Schiebe's cabin, and didn't catch anything. I moved a little further south to the Birches, but caught only a rock bass, although something big hit my line and bit off the jig. I retied another 1/8 ounce, parrot color Gumball jig, tipped it with a leech and resumed fishing.

Unfortunately, I was not able to catch anything else. Not even a small perch. I suppose if I was using a fathead instead of a leech I may have caught perch, but I was after walleye. At 4:00 p.m. I came ashore.

Nature Update: For some reason the wind seems to be blowing almost exclusively out of the east, or some variation of the east, such as NE. In my many years here at Leech Lake I have typically seen wind out of the north, south and west, but rarely the east. But for some reason, the prevailing wind direction during the past six weeks is east.