Mid-November Crappie, Bluegill, Perch.....

Went out trout fishing Monday afternoon with Mike Steffa, Justin, Dad, and his friend Todd. We took out the pontoon boat in search of some golden and rainbow trout and were pleasantly surprised with some nice crappies, bluegill, perch, walleye, largemouth bass, and some trout! 

The fish were not too active, and we really didnt catch tons of fish, but we did muster up quite a variety of some real nice fish. Check out these fishing pictures from the middle of November!

Heatwave and some Hot Fishing Too

We bolted out of church pretty quick today and headed towards the lake pretty much as fast as humanly possible. Justin came and picked me and the kids up and we headed out to the lake to meet up with Chad and my parents! 70 degrees and sunny doesnt happen too often in November, and we were not about to let this kind of heavenly weather slip away unutilized.

Upon arrival at the lake we sighted in our slug guns for deer season! I just cant say enough how awesome those H and R slug guns are. We could make 3" groups dead on with hornady slugs at 150 yards! At 200 yards the slugs are still fairly straight, but drop about 7-8 inches. I cant even see the targets from that far without using the scope.

Anyhow after about an hour of shooting guns and we headed out fishing! Mae and Noah were more interested in playing on the beach with Grandma and boy were they having fun.

So we get out fishing and we had a bit of controversy to resolve. Dad wanted to fish over here, Chad wanted to fish over there, I wanted to fish across the way, and Justin really didnt care. So after wasting a few minutes going back and forth we resolved the matter by giving each person 30 minutes of whatever type of fishing they wanted to do and where- and it worked out great for some of us!

Chad picked the first spot and hit the jackpot, we gave him an A+. Justin and I both landed some real nice smallmouth bass!

Chad also got into the smallie action (emphasis on the small...hehe)

A couple rainbows and a golden trout capped off this spot, then off to Dad's 30 minutes (more like an hour). Well here are some pics from dads hot spot.............. .................. Oh wait a minute, we never caught a fish while he was captain. We gave him an F.

Then Justin and I kind of joined up for the last spot, since we both knew where we wanted to go and time was running short. We headed to the sunken boats and they produced some nice rainbows, golden trout, and a monster bluegill:

This trip, even though I was schooling Chad, Justin, and Dad....haha.... I wasnt actually taking or teaching anyone how to fish- I was actually fishing. For those of you regular blog readers (both of you), there usually arent many pics of me holding fish, but this time I was fishing the whole trip, and since I was fishing with my competitive family and writing the blog, I might be just a tad biased with this post!

Fall Fish Stocking Finally Done, Now Time for Fun!

Friday evening about 5:30 and we rolled out of Mr. Obrien's pond after unloading our last fish of the fall fish stocking season here in Central Illinois! Over the last few weeks we have been unloading fish trucks from Arkansas, Missouri, Wisconsin, Northern Illinois, and Minnesota. Sounds fairly simple to stock a pond or two with some fish, but it actually is the most stressful aspect of my job!!

Here is the last tiger muskie of the year going into Jared's pond. I didnt take many pictures of fish stocking this season, because it was mainly cold, dark, and rainy most of the time, or we were in a big hurry the rest of the time.


When the fish are harvested, they need to be stocked regardless of the weather or time of day they arrive. We spent many days this fall stocking fish till well past midnight, and many times it took several days straight to get all the fish to their new homes! We stocked over 40 lakes and ponds this fall with over 10000 walleye; thousands of catfish, hybrid striped bass, bluegill, crappie and yellow perch; hundreds of muskie, tiger muskie, and northern pike; thousands of lbs of feed trained largemouth bass and rainbow trout; a couple thousand smallmouth bass fingerlings; and hundreds of thousands of fatheads and shiners!!!!!!

While it is pretty stressful coordinating and delivering fish it is also pretty neat as well! We made a few smallmouth bass only lakes, feed trained bass ponds, trophy trout fishin holes, and one of my favorite stocking projects of the last few years is turning a 32 acre carp infested lake into a world class tiger muskie, northern pike and walleye fishery!
This year instead of just adding fingerlings to that lake, we turned back the clock a few years and added a whole bunch of 3-7 year old northern pike from 25-42 inches long!!!

Anyhow, friday evening I got home and spent the next 51 hours just playing with my kids, and it was great! We picked corn for the geese, rode in a boat across the pond, walked to the apple orchard, fed the goats, went down a big slide 100 times, rode a hayrack ride, took a ride in a monster truck, rode Justin's 4-wheeler for a couple hours, and each had about 5 bags of cotton candy throughout the day. Here is noah stuffing it in as fast as possible!

Noah and Tess on the monster truck.

Tess, Mae, and Ariya are a bit scared, but loving it!

Noah on the Train!

Brook was out of town with some friends at a conference and we just spent every minute of Saturday playing and helping out at the garage sale!

The garage sale is a whole nother topic, but here goes. Recently we moved from our house into a nice 3 bedroom apartment while we are looking for a house to fix up and move into. Anyhow we had a whole bunch of stuff with no place to put it. Also my parents are getting ready to move as well so we combined all our stuff and had a huge indoor garage sale at the barn. Now here is the kicker- we decided to donate all of the proceeds of the sale to feed the children at Gabriels school down in Haiti and with a few posts on craigslist, facebook, etc we had absolutely tons of people come and donate stuff to the sale as well as volunteer throughout! Literally hundreds of people came to the sale on Friday and Saturday and we made a total of $8710 and are not only able to feed the kids at the school for over a year, but a few thousand dollars will help fix some electrical problems down there as well!!!!!

Windmills, Trout, and a Catfish

Met up with George Moss of Outdoor Water Solutions to install a few windmills today and tomorrow. We use these windmill aerators for a variety of aeration needs, especially when there is no electricity available. Some are used for summertime aeration to keep ponds from stagnating, some are used to keep open water in the winter to let sunlight in and keep the pond oxygenated, and some we use to keep open water in the winter to attract ducks and geese for hunting and wildlife viewing!



We finished up installing windmills a bit earlier than expected, so we headed out to do a bit of trout fishing before sunset. At our last windmill install we were talking about trout fishing with our client Josh Catour and we all decided to just head out to the lake. En Route, Chef Todd called and happened to have the afternoon off of work and I think his sixth sense just knew I would be heading out to the lake on this fine November afternoon.

At the lake, the trout were definitely digging this nice cool sunny weather! They were up shallow and chasing pretty much any bait tossed in front of them. We caught trout on mepps spinners, curly tail grubs, jigs, minnows, chicken livers, and canned corn!





We also caught this nice cold water catfish as well.