My buddy Bob and I looked at the forecast and it looked like the next day would be great for crappie fishing. When you get a good day in spring in Wisconsin you better jump in your Wavewalk kayak and take advantage of it.
With fuel prices the way they are, I have decided that I will concentrate a little more this year on lakes that are close to Milwaukee. Kayak fishing really opens up opportunities to explore waters close to larger cities that may not be accessable to larger boats and crowds of fishermen. I find in many outings that I am the only person on a lake, river , or stream because I am fishing from a W kayak.
This was the case this beautiful spring day. We headed to a lake that is very close to Milwaukee. The river we paddled on was full of geese already sitting on their nests. It was challenging at points traversing over shallow water and floating bogs that had blocked the channel. Wavewalk kayaks seem to have been made for this purpose and handled the challenge with ease. As we suspected when we arrived at the lake we were the only fishermen on the lake, and we had the lake to ourselves all day!
Water temps were in the low 50′s and the air temp. was warming up nicely. It was a slow start as we tried a submerged island on the north side of the lake first. Eventually we moved in a little shallower and Bob started catching the crappies we were after.
However my luck wasn’t as good. After loosing a large crappie because of a knot that let loose, I decided to move on to a different part of the lake that seemed to be a few degrees warmer. First cast landed me a largemouth bass which I released. This time of the year in Wisconsin you can only keep panfish on this lake. I continued fishing for crappie along the drop off with my road runner jig and minnow. The bass continued to aggresively hit my bait and I had a blast.
Then a felt a very heavy tug on my light crappie spinning gear. Line peeled off of my reel, I wasn’t sure what I had. Then I got my first look at it, a nice Northern Pike! After a long battle I finally was able to land it and release it. What a great day it was to be out fishing for the first time this spring in our Wavewalk kayaks!
The nice part about this trip is you don’t have to fill up the gas tank on your kayak.
