Last ice trip of the season
Saturday i had the pleasure of running the last ice trip of the year in McKinley Marina. The goal was to get my client on a bunch of steelhead but the brown trout had other ideas. I ran every close to every rod in the top 6' of water with a mix of shiners and spawn sacs on. it didn't take long after setting up for the first automatic fisherman to pop off with a very nice 12lb brown. While my client was fighting that one, I looked up and a second automatic was on the verge of going off. Once I got to it, it tripped with a 8lb brown on the end of the line. After the chaos both fish were on the ice and after a few pictures the big one was put back to fight another day and the 8lb went home to meet the smoker. Once I got the two rods set back up, I pulled out my 13 Fishing Widow Maker with a Rapala Rippin' Rap and told my client "i'm going to be extremely mad if you hook one on this rod but happy at the same time because I've been trying to get a trout on this rod for a long time." While showing him how to work the rippin' rap I saw two big red lines show up on my Vexilar FLX-28 and after a few seconds it's smoked the rap but somehow managed to get off on the hook set. With the look of surprise in my face I turned away from the hole to notice the first auto that went off was bouncing away. Game on! After a 8min fight a large German Brown knocking on 15lbs came topside. After putting him back, it didn't take but a few minutes for that rod to trip again with another big German Brown. All the action took place while there was a light snow coming down and at about 1130, the snow stopped and so did the fish and we decided to call it a day.
