Like most anglers, I’m a map nerd.  I can go down the rabbit hole staring at a map looking at lakes and rivers I’ve not been to for hours.  But my buddy Bob Butler takes it to a new level.  He finds boat put-ins and take-outs overlooked by most.  Bob and I rowed down a bog into a tiny river then on to a small lake today.  I’m happy to say we had some excellent fishing.

It was another warm one and there were very few clouds.  While the mosquitoes let up in such heat, the horse-flies work overtime stealing blood.  Usually I can smack the horse flies no problem but there’s a couple smaller fly species that takes a full hunt to kill.  You need to literally stop casting or rowing, and hunt the fly down.  And honestly, most the time you still don’t get them and the same fly goes on to bite your ankles and feet ten times before leaving satisfied.

Bob always has musky on his mind and his research for today’s location indicated they were around.  We couldn’t buy a fish of any sort in the river or bog but once we got in the lake things looked good.  There were the tall weeds we refer to as “cabbage”, lily pads and sticks.

There were some protruding trees and an exposed sandbar in the middle of this lake.  It was really interesting looking structure.  I called for us to start there and make a drift before the wind kicked up.  We rolled a few fish quick and Bob landed his biggest largemouth bass of the season.

Bob remained dedicated to his musky rod with his large Bill Scherer fly.  I caught one nice bass on my musky set up but then ventured to my 6-weight and picked up a couple bass on a popper.

I went as far as to try for crappie as well.  My rig for crappie is usually my 4-weight but I made due with the 6-weight.  I replaced my popper with a small black woolly bugger and nitpicked deep around the weeds and trees but to no avail.

The musky fly remained steady with the largemouth.  Fishing wasn’t red hot but the bass we caught were nice.  Then the bass run was broke up by a scrappy pike.  This guy may be around 25” but the way he nailed Bob’s fly we thought he had a good sized musky!

We packed it in around 3.  It was a great day and it’s been fabulous to be out fishing almost every day this week.  In fact, for the month of June I fished an acceptable 16 days.  Not bad really.  While I don’t plan to start July fishing over the weekend, I suspect Monday I’ll find myself out there somewhere.  Stay tuned!

Jeff Currier Global Fly Fishing