Crappies For Family Fun

If you’re looking for an inexpensive way to entertain the family some weekend, try taking them crappie fishing.  Crappies are an easy fish to catch, are abundant and usually when you find one, you find a whole bunch of them. 

There are many places to fish for them in our area.  The Wisconsin River bottoms have nice crappies in every one of the dozens of sloughs that lay along the river.  Look for a tree top or a beaver house and you’ll usually find crappies.  Also Blackhawk Lake or Yellowstone Lake both have many nice crappies that are easily caught.

The simplest way to catch them is with a small minnow, a medium sized wire hook and a bobber.  Toss your bait out and you’ll soon see the bobber “sneaking” away.  You can also try small jigs or small spinners for them.  The thing is, crappies are easy to catch for anyone of any age.  They make a great fish for a family outing where success equals fun.

Take the family out and when you find a school of crappies, you’ll have a day of fun, and when you get home, you can have a great fish fry too.

post by: Dan Bomkamp

Wisconsin River Smallmouth Bass

A lot of people don’t realize that we have some of the best smallmouth bass fishing in the entire state, right out in our Wisconsin River.  There aren’t a lot of places where you can spend a day fishing and catch the numbers and size of smallmouths that you can catch in the lower Wisconsin River.

Some years ago a friend and I put our boat in at Gotham and fished the shorelines back to Muscoda.  We only used topwater baits such as the Rebel Pop R and between us we caught and released 146 smallmouths with half a dozen largemouths thrown in for good measure along with a few northerns and even a walleye caught on a topwater bait.  Now that was a day of great fishing!

But, that day wasn’t unusual.  Ever since the DNR put a 14 inch size limit on bass, the size and quality of the fish has just exploded.  The numbers of big fish is amazing and there are trophies out there in great numbers. 

Fishing for smallmouths on the Wisconsin is a simple thing to do.  Get yourself a few topwater baits, a few small spinners and a few jigs and you’re all set.  It’s fast simple fishing and when you find that first school of smallies, you’ll be grinning from ear to ear as you fight these amazingly strong fish.

post by: Dan Bomkamp                                                 www.WisconsinLandValues.com

Here We Go Again?

The DNR is worried about the spread of purple loosestrife, an aquatic invasive plant that is crowding out our native plants.  Near perfect conditions last summer cause this weed to spread and thrive.  Now they’re asking people to help control it.  Nothing wrong with people helping….but I’m not sure that their idea of how to help is a good one.

If you’d like to help you can contact them and they’ll send you a beetle starter kit that will allow you to grow a beetle that feeds on purple loosestrife.  Yay, what a dandy idea, but wait, have they forgotten the dozens of other “cures” that turned out to be worse than the problem they were to fix?

It wasn’t too many years ago that they found the Asian beetle which was released to eat aphids on soy beans.  What a great idea.  But then when there were billions of these tiny little orange critters crawling around our soy bean fields, the fall came and the farmers picked the soy beans.  What happened?  The billions of beetles had no home, nothing to eat and they headed into town and began crawling into every crack and crevice they could find.  Remember the beetle wars? 

There have been dozens of these cures over the years that have ended up being worse than the initial problem.  Maybe I’m pessimistic but releasing yet another exotic species doesn’t seem like a good idea to me.  I’ve got enough beetles in my house already.

post by: Dan Bomkamp

Da Plane! Da Plane!

If you wake up one of these May mornings and see a plane flying low over the hills and woods don’t panic.  They’ll be folks from the DNR who are spraying for gypsy moths.  They spray very early, right after dawn and fly low so the spray is concentrated in specific areas.  The spray will not hurt people, pets or wild animals.

They use a compound called Foray which contains a bacteria that is present in soil but that will kill gypsy moth caterpillars that ingest it.  It’s a perfect compound since its natural and doesn’t affect anything but the gypsy moths. 

The DNR has been battling the spread of these little critters for many years.  They are just one of the never ending new pests that threaten our outdoors.  They’ll probably never be able to stop them but they can slow them down which helps.

So if you see a plane low over your woods, don’t worry, it’s the good guys.

www.DanBomkamp.com