Mississippi River Pool 4 Channel Cats and Sturgeon

With all the rain we’ve been having, the flow of the river has more than doubled since last weekend. What does this mean to the fisher person? C-H-A-N-G-E!

With more water coming down river, the fishing spots that were good last week are empty today. Fish, like people want to eat without spending much energy. On the river, when to water is moving at these flows they want to be out of the current as much as possible and have the river bring the food to them.

Our first spot has done well this year. I thought it would be good because the faster moving water was pushing up to a wall that comes out of 60 of water quickly to about 10 feet. There would be stunned or dieing bait along this wall for easy meals. The one piece it was lacking, was a place for the fish to hide from the current.

This location produced a very angry leather back turtle. I’m not sure who was more unhappy…Vanessa or the turtle. One other bite in this location… it was time to move on.

My guests tonight were Vanessa Koprek and her friend with benefits, Peter Tveitbakk both of Lake St Croix Beach, MN.

The location we move to was a spot that I found it using the LakeMaster chip a year or so ago. Viewing the area, I was looking for one of those “out of the current” spots. What I found on the chip was a location that comes up out of 60 to 70 feet of swift water to about 26 feet. Then it drops back down to 36 feet. The fish will relate to the down stream lip where the bottom starts dropping from 26 to 36 feet. The fish will be out of the current there and the food will be “dropped” by the current right in front of our quarry’s nose.

At least tonight the fish and I were thinking the same way!

We started off using night crawlers, fatheads, sucker fillets and crushed head of sucker. I wanted to let the fish tell us what they wanted. It became clear that sucker fillet followed by night crawler were the baits of choice.

A four ounce no roll sinker was the weight to go with. For the rods that were in the back of the boat a 3 oz would work, but casting a 3 ounce to the side would give us a bouncing of the bottom sinker that would look like a bite until it would finally settle.

Because we’re fishing the Mississippi, all my reels are wrapped with 80 lbs PowerPro. Just because you never know what we’ll run into. Losing a big fish because of too light of equipment is not an option.

Pete tried to take the lead with a 10 pound channel, but Venessa kept him in check. Seems like that’s always the case when these two fish together from what I hear.

Vanessa ended the night with a 47 inch 23 pound sturgeon. That put a smile on her face and Peter’s too.

Using circle hooks with the barb snapped off, makes for quick unhooking, a measurement, a few minutes of revival next to the boat and then Vanessa let go of her tail to watch it wave good by as it vanishes into the depths.

The fog rolled in and made for a cool ride back to Everts Fishing Resort. It’s getting time to pull out the Gamehide bibs for the late night/early morning bites!

See you on the water!