May 24, 2012 -- On Leech Lake

I awoke at 8:00 a.m. this morning to grey skies, wet ground (it obviously had rained during the night), a temperature of a cool 54 degrees and almost no wind. In fact, the lake was quite calm. Not quite "like glass," but close.

Rick got up a short time after me and while we drank a pot of coffee he made numerous phone calls trying to track down the mortgage/foreclosure status of the old Hancock property. Long story short, the property is in a legal situation called redemption, and until such time as it clears that classification, Rick can do nothing but wait. Oh, and no one at the bank that now holds the paper on the property could give Rick a date for the of the property redemption.

Shortly after 9:00 a.m., I got a call from John Newman who was on the lake fishing to inform me that he'd just caught a nice "slab" crappie down in Bass Bay and that Rick and I might want to get in on some of the panfish action. So we ate a bit of breakfast and went fishing.

Per John's recommendation, we started in Bass Bay at the harbor by Wagner's and fished with slip bobbers in the weeds in water no deeper than 2-3 feet. We caught a few perch, and Rick caught a rock bass and a couple of small largemouth bass, but neither of us caught any crappie, which had been our targeted fish.

A slow steady rain began to fall from the slate grey sky but the wind remained nearly nonexistent, with just a whisper from the southwest.

We spent roughly an hour in the shallows of Bass Bay hunting crappie before moving to "The Birches" in search of jumbo perch and walleye.

We both caught a few small perch and hammer-handle sized pike before Rick's rod doubled over. At first we speculated that it might be a pike, but as Rick brought the fish to the surface we could see it was a good-sized walleye. I grabbed the net and landed the fish. A quick measurement revealed the walleye to be 20 inches long, the biggest walleye in my boat this season so far.

With the walleye, Rick upped his tally for today's fishing trip to a few largemouth bass, several perch, a rock bass, a northern pike and a walleye. Truly a multi-species affair.

We came ashore around 2:00 p.m. with a steady rain still falling, a temperature of 54 degrees and a light wind out of the southwest at 5 mph. By 5:00 p.m., the wind had picked up and was shifting more toward the west, the rain had stopped, and the temperature remained steady.

For dinner we had grilled steak, ratatouille, grilled portabella mushrooms and baked potatoes. We decided to stay off the water this evening due to the wind and since we'd eaten fairly late in the day. Instead, we sat in the living room and listened to music. We ended the night before midnight, with plans to go into Bemidji tomorrow to run various errands.

Until tomorrow...