October 23, 2011 -- On Leech Lake

This morning at 9:00 a.m. the temperature was 38 degrees, the wind was light at 5-8 mph out of the WSW and the sky was overcast and grey with a light rain falling.

I puttered around the house this morning, making coffee, checking ESPN.com for sports scores, and calling my parents to see how they were doing. Then around 11:00 a.m. I got a call from John Newman asking if I wanted to join him on the water for a little fishing.

With a light, cold rain falling, temperatures hovering around 40 degrees and the wind at 8-12 mph out of the SW most people would have been content to stay inside their warm, dry houses sipping coffee and reading the Sunday paper, but I donned my Cabela's Guidewear rain gear and walked out to the end of my dock.

John was already on the water fishing, and if fact was directly in front of my house, so he easily spotted me and then brought the boat to the end of the dock where I got in. We then motored out to 11 feet of 47-degree water in front of John's cabin and let the wind push the boat toward shore and north toward Malay's.

On our very first pass something hit my jig and minnow hard and bit it right off. I tied on a new jig, tipped it with a fresh minnow and continued fishing. We had a few bites, but were unable to boat any perch or walleye.

We made a total of four passes and during one of them John hooked into a nice perch, which he added to his total of jumbos in the basket, and I caught a whitefish, which I kept and will deliver to my neighbor Ken Lichttenegger who nets whitefish and then smokes them in a smokehouse. Ken gave me one of his smoked whitefish last year and I shared it with my brother-in-law Tim and my nephew Jackson and all three of us loved it.

We came ashore at 1:20 p.m. at which time I ate a very late brunch, cleaned up a bit and then I took the whitefish down to Lichttenegger's. Well, it turns out that my whitefish was really a cisco, also known as a tullibee. Although they look similar to whitefish the way you can tell the difference, so I learned, is that the tullibee has a longer lower jaw while the whitefish has a longer top jaw. As a result, the fish went back into the lake.

After visiting with Ken for a bit I drove the ATV over to Newman's where he was talking with Tom Malay. John had purchased Tom's old 14-foot aluminum boat and Tom was there delivering the boat. The three of talked for a while then Tom went home. John asked if I wanted to go with him for a brief fishing adventure in his new small boat and I quickly agreed. I went home, cleaned up the kitchen, then met John at his boat lift at 3:30 p.m.

We made several passes from 11 feet of water to as little as 7 feet of water but neither John nor I got as much as a bite. Well, that's not true, right at the end of our 90 minutes on the water John got a bite from a perch but it came off before he could get it to the boat. At least the weather had improved. Gone was the rain, the sky was clear and sunny, although the wind had picked up a bit and was blowing at 10-15 mph from the WSW. The temperature was 54 degrees.

We came ashore at 5:15 p.m. and parted ways. John was going to haul his big boat into Bemidji where he'll leave it for the winter while I came home to have an early dinner.

I spent the evening listening to music and having a roaring fire in the fireplace. At about 9:00 p.m. I did put on a sweatshirt and went out to the end of the dock to look at the stars. The sky was clear and I could see the bright white band of the Milky Way stretching across the sky, I could see the planet Uranus as it rose in the eastern sky and I could see millions of stars. What a wonderful treat it is to be able to really see the night sky. In San Jose there is simply too much light pollution to see anything more than the moon and a few of the brightest stars.

Although my fishing experience was not all that successful today, I still had a fantastic day on, and near, Leech Lake.