Fishing Report: 9.16.2026, Zero to Hero Edition

[Scott McKee]

Bruce and I fished in Wyoming County today with the idea of popping a few big Northern Pike.  We have only fished the lake once before and we caught some really nice Pike and each had a low-forty inch behemoth follow our lures.

As Bruce rowed us to the sloping point where we last saw the Pike submarine, I had a sinking feeling we were screwed. There was an algae bloom. I hate algae blooms. I think fish hate algae blooms.

For four hours our only action was two bass blow-ups on a frog and a Raid Deka Dodge, a huge Japanese crawling bait.  The algae was so bad it looked like we were fishing a cooling tank at a nuclear power plant. Bruce joked we were going to catch Blinky, the three-eyed fish from The Simpsons.  We both were reasonably sure we were going to get skunked.

Then the moonrise started.

Bruce started us off with a decent bass caught with his beloved Baby Loon Whopper Plopper 130 after he skillfully threaded the needle with the bait between two lillypad clusters.

Thank, (expletive deleted)! We didn't get skunked!  A few cast later I pitched the previously mentioned Deka Dodge down a lillypad choked bank and popped the fish below.  Thank, (expletive deleted)! I didn't get skunked! 

I decided to chuck a Bottom Up Scooper Frog in the slop.  On my first cast a bass missed the bait horribly.  I realed in the froggy and zipped it back to the fish. This time the fish below crushed it. Things were looking up!

It's at this point in the story when things got a little crazy.  Bruce bombed his Plopper back into a large opening of open water surrounded by pads. A small pike blew up on the bait.  After Bruce uttered the proverbial feces expletive, a second pike missed the bait. This second pike was much larger than the first.  Bruce kept reeling. About ten yards from the boat somebody dropped an anvil into the water from a plane. "Get the net," was all Bruce said. Netting a fish in pea soup is no easy task, but thankfully I scooped her and Bruce sealed the deal by lifting the hoop farthest away from the handle. BOOM!  We bunked her at 38-inches.

Three casts later Bruce bombed his trusty Plopper about as far as humanly possible, placing the lure exactly in a corner of open water flanked by pads in a 90 degree angle. After two cranks he was rewarded for his casting skill.

We bunked this fish at 36".

I love this image. Look closely. It kind of looks like Oktoberfest sasquatch is helping Bruce hold the fish.  We fished until dark with only a few blow-up misses for our efforts.  It didn't matter. We went from skunked-let's-go-home to wow-that-was-crazy. Fun day.