Grouse Hollow Journal for August 27, 2015 by Greg Koelker
Our kitchen is usually a pretty nice place to hang out, but this time of year, I could just sit back and take in the color and aroma. Ellen has boxes of tomatoes waiting for canning, green and red peppers, red plums, onions, summer squash, cucumbers, and peaches across the room all waiting for the inevitable and delicious. She has been baking zucchini bread and making peach and plum jam and refrigerator pickles, topped off with a baked peach crisp. It don’t get no better.
Once in awhile Vince and I actually catch fish as well as go out for breakfast or lunch. Last week we spent some time in the Queen drowning crawlers on the Black River. The weather was only slightly marred by a stout breeze out of the south causing us to drift even with anchors out. Vince was the guide this trip, having been out earlier in the week with Monty Gilbertson. At first it was slow. We had out slip bobber rigs and I was dragging a hook on the bottom, moving every little bit. Vince caught the first fish, a nice 8-inch bluegill; we had a seed in the livewell! I caught the next three, on the bobber rig and on the bottom set, so they both were effective enough. We had to change our depths and move our baits a lot, but mostly the action was slow enough that we could easily shirk our responsibilities at home and still work on the problems of the world. Still, once in awhile, the action got fierce; we had some doubles and even a triple going once, and we had to scramble - well sort of - to keep our lines from tangling while we landed and unhooked pretty much mostly slabber panfish. We also had to stop and untangle a couple of times too. We caught a few perch, but kept only one. Around 10:30 or so the fish took a break, so we did too and headed to Nutbush City Limits for breakfast. When we offloaded the fish into Vince’s bucket, we had 21 gills and the perch.
Ellen and I went the next morning. We anchored and at first nothing happened. That’s why they call it fishing and not catching I was thinking, and breakfast might come earlier today. Then something decided to pick a fight; El set her hook and had a battle on her St. Croix ultra-light! The fish ran and dived and jumped. She played it perfectly, finally getting it close to the boat, where I was able to get a net under it. It was a dandy small mouth bass. Its color was dark compared to lake smallies we caught earlier this summer, but its red eyes glowed. We admired it and put it over the side. El’s morning had been made I think. The wind was hard enough that the anchors were sweating bullets and losing, so we bounced and drifted into new water. We started to get some perch, all cigar sized. Then some nicer sunnies showed up and we put a few in the livewell. Ellen hooked another good one and had her hands full for awhile, getting the fish up to where it just started to show through the murk before it took another run. At first I thought it must be a walleye, but it took so long and never really quit, so it had to be something else. It was fighting even when I netted it. In the boat, we had an angry 22-inch blue catfish. When I called “time for breakfast,” we had hooked a menagerie including: bluegills, crappie, perch, mooneye, bass, and catfish. What I finally cleaned filled two quart bags of fillets. It is always nice when fishing involves catching.
Our young friend, Eli Jackson showed up while I was cleaning a few fish the next morning after another trip with Vince. His plan was to check sign and his eight trail cameras. When he got back, Eli and I drove up to Will and Andy Beitlich’s with a couple bags of fish fillets. They were working on a truck when we got there. The four of us talked deer hunting and coyotes and crops, including their failed sweetcorn experiment and the bountiful red raspberry crop, and - gulp - politics. Andy said he had planted some leftover sweetcorn seed from last year, but only a few plants came up. He said they found out much too late that even though you can plant last year’s field corn without doing anything special with it, one has to put leftover sweetcorn seed in the freezer to store over a season.
Ellen and her sister Kathy drove up to River Falls on Saturday to help with some of the preparations for this weekend’s wedding of our niece Chelsey Hauk and her beau Maximus Decimus Meridus Bjerstedt. The girls had a great lunch with brother Brian and the kids and got some wedding stuff done. After they got a weather report, they decided to head south to beat an in-coming monsoon from Minnesota. El said that there were many sailboats out on Lake Pepin when then were going north, but on the way home the increasing wind had turned the lake to foam with whitecaps by late afternoon, and there was only one brave sailor left.
Until next time, get out - the DNR has recently been ordered to sell off 8,300 acres of state land. Some of it has some pretty good trout fishing ponds and streams on it. According to several hunting property real estate sites I looked at, recreational land in Wisconsin - depending on where its at anyway - is bringing an average $2500 an acre. That would bring the state less than a quarter of a million dollars for those lands. That doesn’t seem like much for what the lands can be used for by hikers, fishermen, hunters, snowmobilers, skiers, etc. to me. My grandmother would say that is pennywise and pound foolish I think. I wonder who will get first crack at purchasing these “excess” state lands. Anyone care to speculate? Enjoy.
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