Willard 15 July a good outing...

[jjannie]

Sorry for this delayed posting....

Hadn't noticed a recent Willard posting, so thought we'd post this one for those who may be making a trip to Willard this weekend.

Left out of the north marina about 7:30 with the plan to get off the water before it got too hot. Knew our chances would be diminished with the full moon - but you need to give it a go when everything seems right, right?
We had hopes of seeing mom catching walleye as we had done earlier this year. (When will we learn that Willard is not an early fishing body of water?) Headed out to just south of the light pole then put our lines out at about 8:30. Thankfully it was nice morning so we just enjoyed the boat ride for awhile . We put out bottom bouncers with night crawler harnesses (2 off planer boards to spread things out a little, trolling fast enough that they were not really bouncing, but it worked well before.

It wasn't until 9:40 we finally caught the first wiper of the day. A respectable 2lbs, 17" one. Mom had fun bringing it in. 5 min later an 18" 1lb 12oz catfish. The rest of the day was all wipers. The largest of which was 17.5" 2lbs 3oz - in total we kept 2 wipers and the catfish, released 8 wipers that were 14-15". 11 fish in 3 hours if you only count when they actually started biting.

We never saw any wiper boils. Never did get a walleye. But Mom was happy to have wiper and catfish for dinner that night.
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[SkunkedAgain]

Nice post and thanks for the update. J
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[Old_Coot]

Thanks for the post and pics!

That second picture is pretty interesting. That is a great example of the side stripes on wipers and how they can be quite uniform and straight and then on the other hand, they can be VERY disorganized. That picture shows the two extremes.

Thanks for sharing.
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[wiperhunter2]

Nice report and Pics Jeff. Although it is not impossible, catching walleye at Willard this time of the year is tough. I hope to get out to Willard, one day this week, hope I do as you and your Mom did. How fast were you trolling the bottom bouncers?
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[OutSideFishing]

That's bada** that your mom went fishing with ya. Wish my mom would go with me atleast once
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[jjannie]

Trolling speed was 1.7-1.8. We let about 54ft of line, of course about 20 of that is from the rod to the water, so on for the planer boards its about 34ft, then the board - then however much more to get it out to side - we let about 40ft - for a total of 75.

Mom's been a fisherman from way back as a child. The fishing gear has changed a lot since then, but her love of fishing never has. She also helps with the cleaning and cooking too, so it's always nice when we can get her to come up through here on her way north from AZ to visit more family in N. Idaho.
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