It was a trip about learning and well worth my time

Monday, July 17, 2023 – The Oshaukuta Outdoors Group
Bob Tomlinson

When I bought the SeaArk from Don in Sun Prairie I asked him to go for a ride with me on the river. He had fished the stretch of the Wisconsin River from the Dekorra landing to the mouth of Duck Creek many times. He is a trolling fisherman looking for walleyes.

He arrived at the agreed upon time and we headed for the landing at Dekorra. I told him to do the piloting while I rode in the bow and watched and listened to the things he would teach me. 

I was learning all about tilt, trim and jack plate vocabulary and technique. In addition to the operational part of the SeaArk I was also learning about the electronics on board, the running lights, bilge pump switch and more. We cruised up the river toward the mouth of Duck Creek with me giving him some historical perspective on that particular stretch of water. He had never gone farther up the river than that point so I became the navigator and took him to the mouth of the Baraboo. The water was pretty skinny but we did manage to cut across from the Baraboo to the Pacific side of the river. We didn’t go very far however. 

We turned around and made our way back to Duck Creek where we started casting toward the bank with some rubber baits. I had never fished that way so it wasn’t long and I’d got hung up on a branch or log larger than my outfit could beat so I lost one of his jigs and of course the rubber offering attached to it. Not long after I lost that rig Don got hung up and also had to re-rig his rod. 

After I retired from teaching and took my first trip up the river, I noticed a small cut on the Dekorra side of the river that had been created by high water. At  point “the cut” was only about six or eight feet across. As the river flows I knew that the cut was going to just keep getting wider and wider and in time would most likely become the spot where most of the water goes. The cut was occurring with some large trees on both sides of the current rushing through there. 

Adlo Leopold wrote about the shifting sands of the Wisconsin River in his book “A Sand County Almanac.” He wrote about the water always changing the look of the river and with its shifting islands. Every time the river rises and rushes toward the Gulf of Mexico it both tears down and creates at the same time. If you traverse the river often enough you notice every subtle change. A couple examples are a spot on Lib’s Island (named after Liberty Cross who owned it before the power company took control. About a third of the way up river with Lib’s Island on the port side there has been a nice little slough where many fish have been caught. I have always referred to it as Grandma Tomlinson’s Slough after my grandmother who loved to fish in that spot. On one outing when I was a young lad she caught a very large northern pike on her cane pole and that was a forever memory for me watching her hold off a mid-30s green fish. “The River Men ” as I call them, the Kowald clan ,refer to that slough as “The Toilet Bowl,” not because of human waste in there but the way the water would swirl in high water when it went over the banks. Today, that slough has water running through it from the DeKorra side all the time but also from the Caledonia side in high water times. In a matter of time it will be impossible to get in there because the sand is quickly filling in the entrance. When “The Cut ” becomes the main channel down through what has been for decades Davis’ Slough, (named after the Davis family who owned the property on both sides of County JV. Grandma’s slough may be just a pond on the end of Lib’s Island. It will get refilled periodically with high water in the river. A second spot is what I always called Ivy Island. It was a small island set right between the old channel on the Caledonia side where the Baraboo river comes around the bluff and most of the water from the Wisconsin does during normal flow times. Ivy Island was named by me because most of the flora on it was poison ivy but still, campers chose that island every weekend. Now the island is actually two very tiny ones soon to be completely washed away. The trees will wind up on the bottom or cast aside along the shorelines and the sand will further impede the flow of the current and shift the deeper water back and forth across the channel.

As Don and I drifted with the current I chose to switch approaches and replaced his jig and rubber minnow with a hand-painted water splasher (brand name in the store is Whopper Plopper) with a white body and loon spots painted in black. It has an orange chin and red pectoral fins. Don questioned my wisdom of throwing that thing into all the gaps between trees, logs and branches along the shorelines but I knew what I was doing because I do it all the time. It’s the way I catch fish. Not long after he questioned my approach I made a perfect cast and after about two cranks of the reel the water splasher was stuck in the jam of a nice smallmouth bass. I quickly yanked the fish out of the log jam and battled with it in open water. I was the winner in that battle. It was a beautiful 17”-18” smallie. I removed the plug and dropped the fish back into the drink. 

That was about all the excitement for that trip but I had learned a lot about the boat and how it handles. It was an important river trip for me. 

Next up is a story about our long river trip from Dekorra to Lake Wisconsin but you’ll have to wait until tomorrow to read about that adventure.

Have a great day!

Bob