My friend, Terry, and I met up with Hardwater Junkie at Turquoise just before 7AM this Saturday. Terry just bought a snowmobile and we decided to test it at Turquoise. We knew from experience that there was always snow on the lake and we were anxious to try some new area that we had never been able to access before. HJ had never fished here before so we were all stoked.
It was a toasty 10 degrees when we got there so it was going to be a warm day. HJ and Terry fired up their sleds, loaded the gear and off we went. Our plan was to head to the boat ramp nearest the dam to access the lake but the ramp was gated closed. This was the first bad omen. We turned around and headed down the big hill by the dam only to bury the sled with all our gear. After about five minutes of digging it out we were able to get on to the lake. We started to got the west when we got bogged down in slush about two hundred yards from shore. I fish Turquoise every year and have never seen this much surface water or slush before. My guess is that there was 6-10" of slush and 2-4" of standing water in a few spots.
Here is what it looked like when we got bogged down. Terry is standing in water up to his ankles. After we got our sled loose we noticed that HJ was about a mile away and appeared to have some problems of his own. Being snowmobile newbies, we weren't all that crazy about the slush and getting stuck so we opted to fish right near where we got stuck - over the old dam.
I set up the huts while Terry took off across the lake to help HJ. After about fifteen minutes both returned and we settled in for a nice day of catching over the dam. Usually there are a lot of people over the dam but we were alone this year. It was very difficult walking through the slush this year. To make matters worse, there was a thin layer of ice over the slush in some places so you could move without sinking in. Unfortunately, a lot of the time the ice layer was too thin and you'd crash through, making it seem even harder to walk. Hence, most people were fishing along the shore.
It seemed ironic that we had used snowmobiles to fish the same spots we fished every year before we had snowmobiles. Sigh. The new spots will have to wait for better ice conditions.
I dropped a pink crappie critter with sucker meat down the first hole and was feeding the line down by hand. That's when I saw a laker come off the bottom on the Vex and take the jig. I set the hook by hand and quickly closed the bail, adjusted the drag and landed the fish. It was a beauty by Turquoise standards, going just over 21" and hefty. It turned out to be the largest fish of the day.
Between us we caught about 20 lakers and 20 rainbows. We ended up taking a few home and left the rest for another day. We had to start and move the sleds several times as they kept freezing to the ice. As we loaded the snowmobile on the trailer we saw that there was a huge block of ice attached to the bottom of Terry's sled - probably 18" by 18" and a good 9-10" thick. No wonder we had problems!
