For the past few years (in 2004) I spent the first couple of weeks of September fishing in Wisconsin and got home last Thursday from this years trip. The fishing in Wisconsin is quite different than what we have here and the trip is very enjoyable.

In Wisconsin bass are not fished for like they are here. There, walleye are the quarry for food and muskie and northern pike are sought for their fight. In fact, muskie fishermen say all other fish, including bass, are just bait. Since bass don’t get a lot of pressure, the fishing for them is much better in many lakes.

Weather there is very different, too. The host of our group said he had seen everything from 90 degrees to snow on the ground on September 1st, and we had a little of everything while I was there. Most mornings the temperature was in the low 40s and a jacket felt good. It warmed up to 80 a couple of days, but the humidity was low, so even that felt cool.

Water temperatures were in the mid sixties, a good range for bass to be active. Local fisherman told me that was about the normal range all during the summer. The week before I left to go up there the water temperature here at High Falls and Jackson was 87 degrees – 20 degrees warmer. Bass here were deep and not feeding very good.

Most days up there I was able to catch a good many bass by fishing shallow water. My best day I had 8 smallmouth bass up to three pounds and three big pike that all hit while fishing water just a couple of feet deep. My partner caught a 4 pound largemouth that day as well as several smallmouth, and had a 40 inch muskie follow his bait right to the boat. We both got a good look at it.

The reason I go to Wisconsin is for a small tournament set up by a group of fishermen on an internet newsgroup. We talk about fishing all year, posting messages and pictures. Then we get together in the spring in Tennessee and in the fall in Wisconsin. It is a lot of fun meeting folks and fishing with them after talking on the net all year.

We fish Boom Lake in the city of Rhinelander, a 1800 acre group of lakes on the Wisconsin river. This lake does get a good bit of fishing pressure, and bass are harder to catch. The minimum size is 14 inches and it is easy to catch a lot of 12 and 13 inch largemouth and smallmouth, but you can’t keep them.

In the tournament I weighed in 5 keepers at 8.5 pounds and placed second out of 20 people. That made me feel good since two of the fishermen are local guides and two more live in the area. I pulled my boat 1138 miles one way to fish waters I am not familiar with and still placed pretty good.

Smallmouth fight much harder than largemouth and a 13 or 14 inch smallmouth will really give you a good pull. And the waters there are not like what I am used to fishing. Shallows are filled with Lilly pads and other types of water weeds, and stumps fill them, too. A lot of the bass we caught hit topwater baits like the Zoom Horny Toad and pike would give you a thrill when they exploded on it.

Most of my fish hit a Yamamoto Senko cast to shallow cover and allowed to settle to the bottom. I had three smallmouth and two largemouth during the tournament, and three of them came on the Senko. The other two hit a 4 inch Zoom worm. I caught a lot of bass too short to bring to the scales on those baits during the tournament, too.

I am already looking forward to the trip next year.