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Maybe next time.

After sixty seven straight days of fishing you can get tired. I don’t get tired of fishing, just tired. You fish so much you wear the skin off your index finger unhooking walleyes. The boat is still rocking and you have been in bed for twenty minutes. Close your eyes and the bobber is still floating there.

I leave in the morning, sky so overcast I can smell the portent rain. I grab my sunglasses and someone asks why. It’s almost funny now to me. By feel I can let the anchor line out with a preset knot for a certain hole on a specific lake. The knot is as sure in its depth restriction as the walleyes showing up for the night bite when the sun just slips behind the big white pines. Your watch wont matter, the fading sunlight starts the show.

Charge the fish finder overnight, set the coffee pot, hang the less fragrant vest. Take out the big landing net and kiss my darlin daughter goodnight. Pay some bills and hit the alarm button.

You open my garage door it’s an uncountable number of rods for open water. I can’t begin to tell you how many hand liners or ice fishing poles. It just gets easier to change rods all set in advance with two pound herring set ups versus fifty pound seven strand.

I have nine boats. None leak. Some lakes I can tell when a storm changed a single tree. Where the thread is through the wild rice to the main lake basin three miles up lake gets so narrow it looks like a muskrat trail through a stagnant pond. Try Wolf Lake mid summer.

Every day I expect the buckle to snap on my life jacket but it just keeps working. I have fifteen spares. Filleting walleyes on my pants leg is just as fast as on a flat rock. Three spins into the loop and the hook is knotted. Its reflex.

Multi colored Jigs in one plastic box. Spoons of one color for one lake that always produce. The lure helps but the lake is that is just that healthy and under fished. I have over thirty years, one rock at time, built a dock on a lake. Why only this one place? If you find it, enjoy.

Rivers names haven’t changed titles, but oh how the holding water does move. Spring runoff drops in a sunken log and instead of hooking a big one I snag up on a, move now, or just lose more wet flies. That hurts to lose a great hole.

I come off the water and someone asks how I did. I show them my fish. They tell me there stories. Every tale hooks me. I like meeting the people at the boat access. Were even. No matter whose boat is bigger or what year my truck is or isn’t. It’s just about the fish. A few times per year I get to look in some extraordinary fly, and tackle boxes. Then it’s the “trade” show.

I can’t name some of the bugs my flies imitate. But the fish hit em and that’s enough for me. I don’t know all the plants names or what stars make up what constellations and I can live with that also.

Tomorrow I can’t fish. Not on my way to work or on my way home or call in sick. Im not complaining it’s just a fluke in my daughter’s schedule. I just hope before its all over I could say I hit 365 in a row once. Its one of my goals so I may be tired but I’ll try again starting a day after tomorrow.

The trout whisperer.
 

Karl "Trout Whisperer" Seckinger is a respected JustNorth author and outdoor adventurer. His guide service, DuNord Guide Service, and the trout waters that he fishes in the Superior National Forest, are some of the most tightly guarded secrets among Trout enthusiasts in Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Contact Karl at 218 - 525 - 0442 or write to him at:

DuNord Guide Service - 6999 Culbertson Road, Two Harbors, Minnesota 55616

Learn more about DuNord Guide Service in the JustNorth MarketPlace.