Well had the whole day alone today to fish, thought it would be great to get out and relax. Loaded up the old Honda and the Bay-Runner and headed for a day of exploring Joes Pond for some multi species jigging. Got there about 9am and found the access was full. When i went to jig the trailer around i managed to drop a front wheel into the ditch. Unloaded the wheeler and unhooked the trailer to get it out of the way. Thank god another group of guys pulled in behind me and was willing to give me a tug out. Never got their names but if you guys are on here thanks again. Once that circus was done, i got out on the ice for a few hours, managed to jig up a bunch of small perch, and rock bass. I kept moving deeper to get away from the pan fish, amazingly i was still getting perch at 65ft. Around lunch time i finally found the smelt in 60ft of water down 40ft. I settled in and started to cook lunch, when my cell rang (dang thought there was no service on Joes). It was one of my heating customers with no heat, time to pack up I guess. Ran home to grab tools and parts, but decided to leave the trailer on, was headed near shadow lake in Concord any way. Got the furnace fixed up and headed back to ice about 2:30. There where a few guys along the west shore but rest of the lake was empty. I wasn't expecting any thing huge there, but there was near constant perch action every where on the lake. I broke out the aqua-vu and played around in 10-20fow. The light was good and water was clear, i was seeing huge schools of 6-8" perch and even small pickerel mixed in. It was cool to have such numbers, i played around with some plastics and powerbaits that i would never usually use, and played around with jigging different ways just to see how they would play it. In all probably C+R ed over 75perch in under 2 hours, learned a bunch on perch behavior, and finally got my relaxation i was looking for. It certainly wasn't the day i had planned, but turned out to be what i needed in the end.
