Successful Fishing Team Season
by Larry Damman, Club Advisor
Shell Lake/Spooner high school team competed in 4 Wisconsin Interscholastic Fishing Association (WIFA) ice fishing tournaments. Each event requires somewhat different strategies as to species and sizes needed for success. Persistence is a factor since the fishing time allowed runs 12 to 24 hours. Teams pick the day and/or waters they will fish and submit measurement photos to the judges thru an app called Fish Donkey.
It was nip and tuck if we would have enough ice for the first event. Just in time, the ice got thick enough to walk out, but not enough for vehicles. The 250 Challenge was a multi species event with the goal of accumulating 250 or more inches. Our small band of 7 students finished 10th out of 61 schools even though most other schools fielded larger teams.
Success continued in the January Jamboree. In this case WIFA selected the lake in our region to fish. It was -17 degrees as we headed out in the pre-dawn darkness. The ice was just thick enough for ATVs, but we didn’t have any. The spot coach Amos Melton scouted out was a long walk but easy going on the snow free ice. As the day went on we slowly accumulated a decent bag of bass and northern but our catch of bluegill and crappie was dismal. As sunset approached the team made a long move to find the panfish. Jack pot! They hit the mother load in the twilight hour. Adding the panfish lifted the team to finish 29th of 96 schools.
In the North/South Tag Team event schools are paired and compete as one but on their own home waters. We had a tough bite and a long, tiring day fishing one lake in the morning and another in the afternoon. I do wish coach Amos could find spots that aren’t 2 mile walks from the access. Except for a nice northern, we were catching the same species as partner Germantown, only smaller. As a result we were of little or no help and dragged Germantown down with us to finish 18th of the 19 the school pairings.
The season wrapped up with a respectable 29th place finish of 59 schools in the state championship. The state championship was to be a weekend long gathering of all the teams on the Mississippi at LaCrosse. Unfortunately, the over night trip road trip was not to be. Ice conditions on the river were unsafe so things went to plan B. Schools would fish their home waters. Again the bite was slow for us and we fished 2 different lakes. The high light of the day was a surprise catch of a 29 inch channel catfish. Not a species that counted in the contest but cool none the less.
Friends into Spooner Hatchery sponsors the high school team. In addition, we do season long ice and summer fishing contests through Fish Donkey for all Shell Lake and Spooner high school students. Registration for the summer contest will open soon. Watch for announcements at school.
FISH’s High Schoolers Start Competitions
Our Shell Lake/Spooner fishing team’s first event was the WIFA 200 Challange. We placed 10th in a field of 41 schools from across the state. The Wisconsin Interscholastic Fishing Association (WIFA) hosted this first of its kind event. Each participating school picked the water and day it would fish. Coaches photographically recorded fish measurements as well as each lucky angler using the Fishdonkey app. The app allows the host to verify measurements and tally team scores. It also allows everybody to see how the competition is doing in real time.
The total inches of a team’s largest 20 fish, regardless of species, was their score. Northern Pike were our primary target. Averaging longer than most fish, northern can rack up points fast, assuming you can catch them. On January 21, we hit the ice for a dawn to dusk day of fishing. It was cold but not unbearable. Still the hot dogs got cold before you could get the catsup on.
Things started out pretty bleak. More than 2 hours past and we hadn’t gotten a single flag. Fortunately, the northerns began a slow but steady bite during the mid-day hours. The 7 team members that could make the event racked up 434 inches. The lake we fished shall remain anonymous.
Teams meeting the 200 inch minimum are eligible for one of five $250 prizes to be drawn at random at the state tournament in February. Not all the teams got 200 inches so we have a 1 in 6 chance.
Bay Trip Ends Club’s Season
by Larry Damman – March 7, 2020
March 7 began early for the intrepid 8 heading for the pre-dawn rendezvous at River Rock Bait Shop in Ashland. Everybody arrived on schedule. We stopped there to pick up the right minnows and hot local lures you can’t get at inland shops. Emerald shiners, native to the Great Lakes, are the only minnow sanctioned by Coach Amos. Then it was back into the vehicles and around the Bay to Bayfield. Here we loaded up the trailers and sleds and hitched up the ATV’s. A bumpy, several mile trek on the ice put us on the edge of a 30- to 70-foot drop off. Everybody spread out to cover the area with holes, set up the tents and got fishing.
The emerald shiners seemed too small for the monster trout I envisioned catching. Amos says, “Trout and salmon are hard to catch on standard tip ups. They hit on the run but quickly sense something is wrong and spit them out.” We were using various jaw jacker type rigs instead of tip ups. Trout instantly take the smaller bait, hook and all, and the jaw jacker sets the hook mouse trap style, before they figure out their mistake. The other way to hook them is jigging spoons and other lures, plain or tipped with wax worms or minnows. Jigging is a slow moving video game. You jig your lure while watching it on a sonar unit. When a fish shows up on sonar you tease it into taking your lure. That assumes the fish show up, which they didn’t. After a few hours one of Amos’s spies reported some fish were biting not far away. So we packed up moved and set up again. Things were still slow but better. Sonar readings showed there were fish on the bottom which proved to be smelt. The picky biters were hard to hook. I would have loved to get 30 or so of these small fish for a meal but the picky biters were hard to hook in the deep water. We managed to get some to use for burbot bait later. Burbot are in the cod family and eat most anything near the bottom, live or dead. They are most active late in the day or at night.
The emerald shiners were starting to see some action. Layne Olson managed 2 splake, a 17-inch keeper and one that didn’t quite measure up to the 15-inch size limit. Splake are a man-made cross between a brook trout and a lake trout. Splake don’t get real big but are very popular as table fare. Castin Melton bagged a small brown trout and a nice splake. I got a herring.
The action was not overwhelming so we packed up again and moved all the way across the bay to the Ashland lighthouse area in hopes of finding coho and burbot. The day had warmed, and we all got splashed with slush on the long trek. We had the area to ourselves. A large ice heave, running for miles, prevented people from nearby Ashland getting out to us. Ice on massive water bodies is more like a jigsaw puzzle than a continuous sheet. The pieces act like the earth’s tectonic plates. Shifting wind and water currents, push and pull on the pieces creating ice mountains or pulling them apart leaving open water gaps. Ice mountains are tempting to climb on but too dangerous. They can be unstable and hollow with open water underneath.
The coho and burbot proved to be more than a match. Tommy Peoples managed to add another splake to our catch. Then it was time to pack up and get back to Bayfield before dark. Diehards Riley Cronk and Tommy Peoples just couldn’t give up on burbot. Coach Amos put them on a Burbot spot near the Bayfield dock and the rest of us headed home. We didn’t have a lot of fish to clean. That’s why it’s called fishing and not catching. Just going somewhere new and trying your best is worth it. As usual Layne had given his all and was asleep before we got out of the parking lot.
P.S. The burbot boys reported that the after dark score was burbot 2, anglers nothing.
Larry Damman is a retired Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources Fish Manager who is current president of Friends Into Spooner Hatchery (FISH) and coach of the Spooner/Shell Lake High School Fishing Team.
See Larry’s article on the previous fishing trip