Don’t Forget To Check The Knot, Especially On Vacation
With the first half of our vacation drifting into the memory banks, Darrell turned the truck towards Killarney and our last stop, Tyson Lake.
While Sturgeon Bay is full of campsites and cottages, there are relatively few cottages at Tyson Lake and the feeling of being in the wilderness cannot be avoided. At Tyson, and its adjoining lake, Spoon Lake, it is quite normal to spend an entire day on the water without seeing anyone. And that is how we spent the last two days of our vacation – seeing only a handful of people and boats, having much of that wild beauty to ourselves.
Rock faces and trees - the predominant sight up north. My pictures fail to do the scenery justice as it was absolutely breathtaking.
The launch at Tyson is actually quite nice and easy to use. The main problem is that the parking lot is not big enough to turn around in if there are other vehicles parked there. It was easy to tell first-timers from those that had launched there before by the tight spots they got themselves into.
Once again we used drop-shotting as our go-to technique. On Tyson it worked well close to shore to land us some decent smallies during the day. The numbers weren’t there and neither were the trophy fish, but with such a relaxing setting it was hard to be upset.
The night bite proved to be best as the smallies hit frequently on top water lures. Again I used my Rapala DT Fat 1 and boated quite a few smallmouth. I don’t do much night fishing and found it difficult to remove trebles with limited light without hooking myself!
I think we finally managed to make Jack tired. He insisted on crawling into Darrell's lap and refused to get back down.
We ran through the narrow and obstacle-ridden channel that joins Tyson to Spoon and spent some time fishing there. In Tyson we targeted smallies but in Spoon it was all about largemouth bass.
Look at all the wonderful weeds and slop! Prime location for largies.
Again, Scum Frogs ruled the day and the fish had fun teasing us before finally biting. It took some work and we had to get through a lot of small fish, but we finally caught a few decent ones.
There is something about the air up that way – it’s so much cleaner and refreshing, with just the right scents mixed in to make me want to bottle it up and bring it home. It’s no wonder that sleep comes easily after spending the day enjoying the beauty of the wilderness and inhaling that air. Eventually you drift into a world where only you exist, almost like it’s a separate planet. It really is amazing up there.
Of course, our trip would not have been complete without another ‘mishap’ and this caused us to reconsider moving on to another lake. We pulled into a bay to anchor and have some lunch. Darrell lifted up the anchor and was about to toss it over when the knot came undone and the anchor fell to the bottom of the lake. *sigh* Now we had to spend more money on the way home to pick up another anchor. But more than that, the incident left us feeling a little snake-bit. On this trip we had already enountered:
- a bent-up boat trailer,
- a broken fishing rod,
- a burnt up bilge pump,
- and now we had lost an anchor.
An early morning on Spoon
Our last morning enjoying both Tyson and Spoon. It was a beautiful way to end our vacation.
It was an amazing trip and only strengthened my desire to move north. I know it’s a longer winter but to be surrounded by something this special would make it all worthwhile. And despite all the mishaps I can’t help but think our week away was perfect – I got to spend it with my family, in the boat, catching fish, in a beautiful setting. I could not have asked for more.
argosgirl
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