February Smallies

Dog friend, Paul Hansen, from near Minneapolis, MN, likes to spend a balmy February day chasing smllmouth on the upper Mississippi River. A warmwater discharge from a power plant keeps the river at a tolerable temeprature for some winter time warm water action.

Here one of Paul's fishing buds holds up a nice Mississippi red eye that was caught and released last week.

Flash, Feathers, and Fur

Plenty of color and creativity going on in the fly tying world these days. Here is a table full of streamer patterns tied up by the gang from Schultz Outfitters at a recent tying expo.

Deer Parade

The weather has finally started to break here and all the critters are starting to get active again. Had this group of deer come out of the woods and into the front yard for a while today.

They then went down the sidewalk crossed another street and moved into the next patch of woods.

Cold Weather Visitors

Lake Erie is around 95% ice covered right now. Only the extreme northeast portion ice free. Migrating waterfowl are attracted to any openwater along the lake shore. Here is a mixture of diving ducks in full winter colors- canvasbacks, redheads, goldeneye, bufflehead, greater and lesser scaup are all in the group. This group was seen just east of downtown Cleveland while fishing the CEI (Cleveland Electric Illuminating) warm water discharge.

Really GREAT Lakes

Here are some interesting facts about the Great Lakes:

• 20% of all the freshwater on earth is in the Great Lakes


• There are over 11,000 miles of shoreline in the Great Lakes


• The shoreline of Michigan is 3,228 miles, longer than any other state except Alaska


• The Great lakes provide drinking water to over 40 million people

This list could go on and on and one more things is for sure- the Lakes have barely been touched by the fly fishing community. This subject is being explored in depth (no pun intended) by JD in a book he is writing with Stackpole Publishing. Work on Angling the Inland Oceans is on going and is due to be published Spring, 2012.