Summer Fishing in March

Wow, what a weekend! I don't know where to start except to just simply be thankful for such awesome weather not only this weekend, but the entire past week! Unbelievable.

Pretty much everyone in my family ended up at the lake this weekend. I headed out about 6 pm Saturday evening and we burned our hillsides. Altogether about 40 acres total. Justin and I finished burning about 1 am that morning. We actually LOVE fire and burning....I bet the local fire departments got over 100 phone calls Saturday night cause our hills are steep and you could see the flames from all across the whole town of Canton. The fire department guys are cool and let us do our thing all night long. They just said they will only come out if we call them if things got out of hand. Ive been on a few of those for various reasons in my day, but like everything once you learn the hard way a few times you eventually catch on....

When done properly with lots of backburning, we actually use fire to put out the fires. Here is a pic of our first backburn going up the west hill. You can see the smoke and flames bending toward the north, but the fire actually moving to the south.



Here is a blurry pic, but after dark the fire going up the hill glowed for miles away!



So anyhow Sunday morning we headed up to Kersch Cafe in Farmington for breakfast and then headed back to the lake for a picture perfect day of outside church on the beach, lots of fishing, and even some swimming!

First person to go swimming today was Drake. He was feeding fish off the VIP dock when he leaned over just a bit far and ended up in the lake face first. He's a trooper though, cause after we fished him out he just sat on my lap and continued feeding the fish. He LOVES feeding fish!

So anyhow our lake has never been an easy lake to fish from the bank from, previously just the docks or the boats or the beach where the only good shoreline access. Well in the fall and over the winter Justin reshaped the whole south side of the lake by clearing out all the willows and cattails and put in a walking path with a bit of rip rap so now we have 1500' of easy access fishing from the shore! The fish were stacked up there too so that was great to fish for pretty much the first time!

Here are some pics of the kids with some really nice fish. They are going to be fishing like crazy this summer (all by themselves), up and down that whole shoreline!!












So then by the afternoon the sun was beating down and we were getting hot. Time to just go swimming. Me and a boatload of kids headed out to the swim raft on a paddleboard and jumped off into the frigid waters a few times. Crazy to be swimming in March, but the water temps are rising rapidly...

This upcoming week we are heading to Southern Illinois on a road trip to build a dock, test some new lake dyes, install a bunch of fish feeders, and put in an Aeration system. We will end up near Carmi, Il midweek and then head for home hopefully by Thursday.