Fish Tales: It's all about location, location, location

by Bill Eden

Sep 12, 2007

This should be the beginning of some great fishing, but the last few weeks have proven to be hit or miss. On one of our best places, we towed around a worm for hours and never even got the attention of the many perch that live in this lake.

Instead of just giving up and going home, we trolled home. Usually if the fish are not shallow, we try out in the deeper water. By the time we did that, we found ourselves almost back at the truck. It was here that the first fish of the day blasted our bait. For the next two hours we had lots of action, but only along a short section of the shore line.

Turns out this was the only water that was not cloudy. Up where we had been fishing the water was almost lumpy. There were lots of weeds and what looked like pollen floating in and on the water so we tried lures with rattles that made lots of noise. We got no hits, so we went back to bigger lures with loud, bright paint jobs. Still we could not even get a fish to sniff one of our offerings.

There was hardly even a fish showing on the fish finder. But this is not uncommon. If you fish skinny water, lots of times fish move out of the way of the boat and never show up on the sonar. With this in mind, part of our attack plan was to fish small lures on long leads. But it turned out that on this day, location was more important than what you had tied on your line. Once we had found the fish, the catching part was more straight forward.

I took a friend of mine back to this place a week later only to find the same situation. The water was cloudy and the fishing was lousy. So we left here and headed up to the bay. We looked around in the usually places and came up with nothing. Lots of the spots we fish are in water less than 20 feet deep, but on this day it was all vacant water. So we motored out into water over 30 feet deep. Then we started to mark a few fish on the fish finder. Our first fish came off the bottom in 35 feet of water. It was at this time that my buddy learned all he wanted to know about slot limits. Turns out our first fish was way over the allowed slot, but not quite long enough to be out of the slot. So he had to throw it back in. Turns out he has the same opinion as I do about the slot size on Lake Nipissing. Who knew!

Thankfully, by the time we went home we had scratched up enough fish for a fish fry. Some of our perch were getting close to the one-foot mark. With them and some small pickerel, things turned out just fine.

But location turned out to be the difference between fish and no fish.

So until things get more settled, all we can do is keep looking until we find a few fish and set right on top of them.