[walleye4]

Well, made the 1st open water boat trip of the season this past weekend. Headed down to KS to hang out with some friends and fish Wilson Lake. We knew that we would have to break some ice to get the boat on the lake so Saturday morning we headed to the lake with the sledge hammer. Ice was a little thicker than my buddy thought. It was about 2-3" thick at the ramp. I put on the waders and began chipping away at the ice. We started this @ 10 am and finally @ 12 pm, we were on open water. We had to break about 60 yds of ice to get to the open water. Good thing the last 20 yds or so we broke out with the boat!



Once we were on the water, we headed out to our spots and spent about 1 1/2 hours opening them up with the boat. The ice was really thin on most of our spots . It took us a little while to find the shad, but once we did it was game on! We couldn't catch any walleye but the stripers and white bass were sure active. We were catching them on some of my proto-type homemade spoons. The stripers were mainly small with the biggest around 5# I would guess. The white bass on the other hand were pretty good size. We kept 20 that were all over 15"(biggest was just under 19") and 2#'s. They were so full of shad that when we cleaned them, they exploded. We caught probably close to 50 or so in just a couple hours. Wish the walleye would have been mixed in with them though.

[shortbus]

now that's dedicated!

Looks like it was worth it though!

[oucorry]

Looks like it was a little chilly. But I bet you heated up pretty quick when the rods were bending over

[walleye4]

Wasn't chilly except when I was up to my chest in the water breaking ice and when we flew across the lake. It was actually almost 60 degrees.