At some point before I went fishing, I had convinced myself it would be a good idea to fish in frigid temperatures on Mississippi River Pool 2 with buddy John Haynes.  I have been out on Pool 2 five times this year, two of those times were my two worst days of fishing.  The first time was a skunk and this time I managed one tiny largemouth on a Scrounger Headed Fluke and Haynes got a White Bass on a DT4.  Tough for 5 plus hours of fishing.  Thankfully the other 3 trips were pretty good!

Oh well, the Vikes steamrolled the Rams, did not miss much there.  I can now feel my fingers again, I do have a tournament on the 24th, who knows that the weather will do for that tourney….

Rich
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I will be traveling to Spain for about 2 weeks, so no blog entries for awhile.  I will leave you with a few pics of my fun fishing outing last Sunday with my Dad.

4.86lbs Largemouth on my hand scale, finger courtesy of my Dad

Also, check out the great looking cover in this new lake that I had never been to before!!  I will return!!!
Rich
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Josh Douglas & I headed out to one of our favorite south metro bass lakes, we were on the water around 7:30am, just after the rain had passed.  We also brought along Greg, as he had a camera and were hoping to shoot some video footage of fish catches.  We also decided to impose a challenge on ourselves.  We had a goal of trying to catch 20lbs plus by 2pm for a 5 fish limit between Josh & I.  We did a similar big bag challenge last year!

It took us about 20 minutes or so to get in the groove, but once we started catching them, it was pretty steady action for most of the day.  We did about 90% of our damage with Lake Fork Ring frys rigged weightless on 4/0 Heavy OWG Super Strong Youvella hooks.  I am really starting to dig both the hook up and land ratio with my new Youvella hooks.

We actually went through 3 full bags of the Ring Frys in the natural green colors, catching 2-3 fish on average per bait.  We also caught a few fish on paddle tail swimbaits, Swim Jigs, Frogs, and TT Jigs.  We caught a few fish off docks, but most fish came around emerging pads and old pad stem clumps.

Early on in the day, I actually busted a 5lb 5oz beauty.  This was a great fish to put us on the 20lb pace.  About mid day, I caught another nice toad that weighed 4 lbs 10oz; both fell for the LFT Ring Fry.  To go with those we had a bunch of 2-3 lb fish.  We knew we need one more 4.5lb fish to make our goal, but it never happened.  We ended up with 17lbs 13oz, still a very good day and only a couple ounces different then last year.

Stay tuned, hopefully I will have some video to share with you as well!  Next stop, time to start practicing Pool 4 of Mississippi River for the Bassmaster Weekend Series.

Hope all of you had a great MN Bass Opener as well!
RichLindgren.com 
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It was a Super Sunday for me indeed, but that had little to do with the Football game that evening.  Bill and I got up early, got to the walking path as the sun was still below the horizon.  When we arrived to the area, it was breezy and about 21 degrees.  Luckily I was all bundled up with Akinetix hat and gear, makes a big difference when you are fishing in January and you are dressed for the weather.  We were the first ones there this time and agreed to stay close so that we could get good pictures if we caught larger fish.

Bill & I were both giddy and anxious to get our rods unwrapped and make that first cast, my first pitch I had a solid tap and missed the fish, threw back in got thumped again and reared back only to break my line.  After getting a new black & blue 1/2oz Tru-Tungsten jig tied up, it was on, Bill and I were hooking fish at a steady pace.  We were getting bit on nearly every cast when we started.  It only took us about 30 minutes for each of us to get to double digit bass landed.  We even had several doubles.

This was an early 4lb double, my fish is in my right hand, Bill’s in the other

I then walked over to a shallower weed flat and started working that area, I got some bites and some fish, but my 1/2oz jig was constantly fouling with slimy grass, so I tried swimming the jig.   I caught a few fish doing that, but that heavy jig was not ideal for swimming it in that shallow water.  I returned with a 6″ Baby bass BassTrix swimbait to that grassy area and immediately started hooking up on some nice bass; very cool!  After about 6 bass and a few missed fish, they finally ripped my paddle tail off, so back to a 3/8oz Fall Craw jig that I could both swim and work on the bottom.

One of the nicer bass duped by a 6″ BassTrix Paddle Tail

Catching fish on the jig was very fun, but then my mind started to wonder…..  could I catch them on my 7″ Bluegill Tru-Life swimbait????  So I convinced myself to tie it on, in the deeper area where we started, I could get bass to follow on most casts, but they would not commit to hitting it.  I then walked down to the shallow grass area where it was more wind swept and on my 2nd cast, my rod loaded up with a nice bass.  I then caught 3 bass on my next 5 casts with the big swimbait.  How awesome to be on a hot swimbait bite on the last day of January where most anglers are ice fishing in this area???

One of several bass on my Tru-Tungsten Tru-Life bluegill

I went on to catch 38 bass in total, with many 3-4lb class fish, Bill tallied 44 all in about 4 hours.  So if you do the math, that is a bass every 6 minutes for each of us or 3 minutes combined.  It was so fast and intense, I hardly noticed how bad I gashed my finger until I got looking at the photos, no pain, no gain.  I could go into a ton more details, but I got lots of pictures, they explain best!!

 
Nice bass, with a face full of Blk/Blue TT Jig!

 
Bill got a great shot of me early on fishing that weed flat as the sun rose

  
Bill’s biggest fish, he caught several, but its my blog!                        Another solid Jig fish for me

Rich
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The past two winters, I have been doing my best to beat Cabin Fever by casting to open water smallmouth on the Mississippi River.  Don’t get me wrong, its a great time and beats the heck out of ice fishing or sitting at home watching “World’s Greatest Fishing Show” (No offense Z); but there are times when I want to fish for big green bass, with big lures and big sticks.  The river smallies are all about 8lbs test and 1/8oz tube jigs with spinning gear.  There is a part of me that is only satisfied with 1/2oz jigs, 7′ Heavy Baitcasting gear and thunderous bone jarring hooksets, you know what I mean????

So this past Saturday morning I headed up to northern Minnesota to meet my buddy Bill to fish a warm water discharge that is know to have opportunity for both numbers & quality largemouth even in the dead of winter.  I got a late start from home, so it was nearly 1pm before we wet a line and the area was crawling with anglers fishing for bass, panfish and whatever was biting.  Bill did catch a nice chunky largemouth on his first cast, but over all the bites were far and few between.  I broke off on two jig bites due to old line, I told myself to respool before the trip, but I did not

I started downsizing my offerings and settled on a Green Pumpkin Baby Brush Hog texas rigged with a 3/16oz Tru-Tungsten worm weight, very quickly after that switch I boated a few 12-13″ largemouth.

Shot a picture of this little guy, at the time, was not sure if I was going to catch any more…

About 4pm, most anglers had really cleared out, except for Bill and on other guy.  I told Bill, that if I drive 4 hours, we would fish still we freeze or cannot see, it was the latter.  With the reduced pressure and light penetration, the bite seemed to slowly pick up.  It was still a tough bite, as I had to keep using the brush hog and Bill used a small finesse jig.   Also, I had to basically dead stick the bait and shake vigorously on the slack line to get my force bead to click against my sinker.  One thing was, the water was very clear and with my JKruz sunglasses, I often could see bass cruising through some sand spots along the first break.  So on many of the fish, I would pitch my bait into the sand spot and shake it.  The shaking would quickly attract sunfish, once the sunfish started pecking, bass would often come check to see what was up……   And often after 30-60 seconds of shaking, a bass would pick up my bait, I would have not caught half the bass I did that evening with out quality polarized sunglasses.

This was my big fish of the day, right around 3lbs

We did manage right around 30 fish in that last two hours, with the biggest right around 3lbs.  As we walked back to the vehicle, I convinced Bill we would wake up by 6am and be there at first light to give it another try.  Seeing the bass we did not catch and the length of travel drove me to give it another shot on the morning of the Super Bowl Sunday.  Check back soon to read the rest of the story….

Rich
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