We woke up to a cool and misty morning that was overcast and drizzling. We had a breakfast of eggs and sausage and then headed out fishing for a few hours. Unfortunately it was windy once again that made it difficult to fish deep areas or down timber well. Nick and I did pretty well catching probably about 10 Smallies in a couple hours and missing a few more. When we got back to camp the other groups had done pretty well too catching 17 and 25. We had left a little earlier than the others and coach handed out flukes to the other guys so that’s what they did so well with. We were just fishing rapalas. I had heard of flukes before but had never used them. However, for the rest of the trip mostly we all used flukes. Personally, for me it was a love/hate relationship with the flukes. On one side the bass absolutely love them and I really love the action in the water of fishing them and I can see while they do well. But you miss A LOT of fish!!! I caught over 50 smallies on the trip but easily had over 100 bites so it was frustrating for me missing like half of them.

(For those of you unfamiliar with flukes it is a plastic power bait minnow that is salty and usually light colored (we used white). The hooks are the long shank or shaft hooks usually fairly large but there is just one hook so I’m sure that accounts for a lot of the misses. The other difficult thing with flukes is the timing for setting the hook. I tried setting the hook instantly, pausing, and everything in between but it really didn’t matter it was just if you got the specific timing for that particular fish. The other thing I didn’t like about them is that about half of my catches were hooked in the tongue area or lower only about 1/3 of them were in the lip or mouth area. I really didn’t like that but we ate a lot of them and I’m pretty good at getting hooks out quickly with minimal damage so I’m confident most of them lived but I still didn’t like it. )

We had some lunch back at camp and a few people took naps and I went out fishing with Greg. With the flukes we went to town on the smallies probably catching 30 between us in a couple hours and missing probably double that. It was some really awesome fishing. We didn’t measure any of them and unfortunately I forgot my gopro so didn’t get any footage from that afternoon but a few smallies had to be close to 20”. The day was still overcast and breezy but we just hugged the shoreline and fished the drop offs. We came back to camp shortly before dinner and helped cook up the fish fry and stuffing for dinner. Fresh caught fish is so delicious!!! It was a great meal. After supper we tidied up camp then headed out for some evening walleye fishing. It was again windy and overcast but not quite as bad as the previous night but between the 3 canoes I think we only caught like 10 or so. The bite was pretty slow so we ended a little earlier than usual and headed back to camp. We had a nice campfire and just sat around for a few hours again telling stories and plans for the future.