Willie Bee

The fishing has been very good all summer here, and the bigger salmon are finding there way into the coolers. Kings and rainbows are making up the bulk of the catch. The bows have been on the larger size all summer, alot in the 12-15 lb range and the bigger kings in the lower 20's so far. The kids helped ther dad and grandfather haul in these lunkers, the day after the derby. The 23+lb king would have taked at least 2nd in the tournament. The green on green flasher fly fished on the pumphandles and riggers have been the best and the douple orange spoons on the surface continue to bring in the bows. the water temps dropped into the low 50's today so look for the action to get even better. 40-65 foot depth in either direction are producing fish. The pier fishing has been producing some kings and bows and with todays drop in temperature that action will pick up.

It's been a tough bite, with the avarage catch this week being 6-8 fish. Alot of missed fish in the colder water the fish just don't give in at all. Lots of fun, but only half way to the boat. We shifted gears for rainbows on a afternoon trip and boated 7 and 3 kings. It's nice to fish with just spoons on the surface and no pumphandles to crank. Have to congradulate the team on the Big Family from Manitowoc on winning the Bob Uecker tournament. Can't wait to fish against them in the Two Rivers derby coming up and put our pumps and wires to the salmon test.

A mixed charter limit plus one for me today. Bouncing around in the 3-6 footers out in 150-180 feet of water we bounced bottom with the pumphandles and had the riggers down 120 and 140 for the kings and coho and hit the rainbows and lakers on the surface with watermellon and orange spoons. Green and green crinkle flasher fly deep worked great as we missed way more than we got in the boat. To much rolling around out there today or we would have finished early with all the action. Still working on posting the pictures here, but there up on my site.

We finally got the warm up we needed and the fish were right there to meet us. We setup in 90 feet and went to 200 with instant action on the downriggers and pumphandles from 60-100 feet down. The blue/glow and alewife and green and green crinkle Jimmy Flies/Flashers were working the best. We got stuck on 13 fish in the cooler, while having a great day out on the water with multiple fish on at a time. We finished up with a great mix of 7 kings, 1 coho, 3 rainbows, and 2 lakers. We have alot of baitfish in right now and the pier fisherman are getting some fish early in the muddy river water.

I did well running a 6 foot lead with a Ryes Davis head behind a VK flasher on each of the side downriggers. The special trick with the VK is you can make small and large circles and change the rotation direction. Having the flashers roll away from the boat on either side produced some larger fish action.

For a quick look at what it takes to pass the 6-pak license and to take a sample test go to the coast guards website at www.uscg.mil/stcw. You may want to pick up a Chapmans seamanship book and look it all over, everything in the book is fair game for the questions on the test. There are a number of traveling schools out there, I know one is at www.takethetest.com and in NE Wisconsin the Northeast Wisconsin Technical College has a class set up. I had a tutored class and then went to Toledo OH to take the test, two days of tests that were set up in 4 parts, best advise STUDY!