Walleyes, A new camera, and Waconia is Back!
Travis Frank
After a 7 month hiatus from snapping photos, I'm happy to announce that I'm back up and running. A few sweet friends pitched in to get me a gift certificate to National Camera Exchange as a wedding gift, and it helped me pick out the camera I've been saving up for. I'm now the proud owner of a Canon 60D. I thank God for good friends.
With new camera in hand, I took to the water with a couple of walleye addicts last Friday. It took us a few hours and a couple dozen bass, but we finally got dialed in on the fish we were after - walleyes. They managed a nice meal of Tonka eaters and another dandy in the mid 20 inch range. The bite seems to have changed slightly, but the action is far from disappointing. I'm now looking to make a few adjustments to follow the walleye movements into their summer patterns. Bass on the other hand are about as plentiful as they can get. At times the boys were landing them every single cast.
Fathers day was about as good as it gets in the weather department. My fishin' buddy, Dusty Gesinger, and I, took our dad's out for a morning of catching on a small metro lake. We found fat bluegills on the spawning beds with a few crappie & walleyes mixed in. It would have been hard to draw up a better morning.
When our catching was done, I ventured to Waconia with my wife. She was after a tan. I was interested in the walleyes. This was my first time fishing Waconia walleyes this year and I was pleasantly surprised by the results. I caught many walleyes with very little effort. This is a very good sign. For those of you that aren't aware, lake Waconia was missing 5 year classes of walleyes and the lake has been hurting. The DNR attempted to stock fry instead of their usual planting of yearlings. They tried twice and the fry never made. Since they stock every other year, we essentially went 5 years without any walleyes added to the lake. Waconia has almost zero natural reproduction, so we rely heavily on the DNR stocking efforts. To their credit, they were looking to increase the amount of walleyes in the lake and wanted to give the fry stocking a shot. Whether it was from the cormorants or other factors, they didn't survive and a lesson was learned. 2 years ago they changed their stocking back to yearlings and the fish have grown quickly. The results I had on Sunday were encouraging and I'm confident that Waconia will return to the walleye gem that it once was. We are now only 1 year away from having a healthy year class of 16 to 17 inch walleyes in the lake. In my opinion, next year will be a banner year to walleye fish on lake Waconia.
Now is a great time to be on the lake. I have several bass trips coming up and I'm going to start switching gears to the muskie side of life. It's a good place to be. Until next time, keep on livin' your dream!
