The trip that almost wasn't

[Kent]

On Saturday, Shawn and I had planned to do a redo of our fishing trip to Strawberry.  After watching the weather forecast, where the weatherman forecasted 3 to 8" of snow in the mountains, I pulled the plug on the trip.  I got up Saturday morning and after checking the UDOT cameras I realized that, at least between my house and Strawberry, the forecast was way wrong.  Shawn and I decided to do an afternoon trip, which I have never done.  

We arrived to find conditions that were as expected, except for a stronger-than-forecasted wind. We headed south and I decided to try an area that I was hopeful wouldn't be as windy. As luck would have it, the wind was blowing from exactly the wrong direction to find any relief, but the fish were certainly there and willing to bite.   We dropped our first lines at ~11:50 AM.  In the next ~4 1/2 hours, I believe twice I went 5 minutes without a bite, and most of the time I got a bite within a minute of dropping down.  Much of the time, I was unable to get a second rod into the water. 

The fish were extremely aggressive, and it was no problem if we missed a bite, because, if we still had bait on our jigs, we would immediately get another bite from that fish or another one. Other than cold fingers and the Minn Kota acting up, it was a great outing.  Always nice to get out with Shawn again.

[lovetofish]

Sounds like a windy good time. It's that time of the year when Strawberry is off the charts. Kind of funny when I read Shawn's post about ice fishing the Mirror Lake highway lakes i was going to going to write: What are you doing up there when Strawberry is calling your name.

[obifishkenobi]

Thanks for the trip Kent, it was fun as always. I started fishing two rods one with a bobber and the other on the bottom, but the action was so fast that for most of the time I fished one pole with a 1/4 oz. white tube jig tipped with chub. I would just drop the jig strait down and usually have a bite before it hit the bottom. Probably the most productive 4 hours of fishing I've had at strawberry, Kents clicker said 63 at the end of the day and I was catching them at about the same rate as him we boated at least 125. The average size and condition of the fish where great yesterday most where around 20” Kent and I only caught 1 each under the slot.

[wiperhunter2]

Way to go you two, not sure many of us would braved the conditions we had yesterday to go fishing. Nice cutty in your pic there Shawn, great color and fat, was that a normal cutt yesterday or above average?

[doggonefishin]

Nice work! At least with action that fast, you are too busy with the fish to get cold.

I wonder what the count would have been if you were there all day?

[obifishkenobi]

Way to go you two, not sure many of us would braved the conditions we had yesterday to go fishing. Nice cutty in your pic there Shawn, great color and fat, was that a normal cutt yesterday or above average?

I chose to take that picture because that was our average fish yesterday.

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Nice work!  At least with action that fast, you are too busy with the fish to get cold. 

I wonder what the count would have been if you were there all day?

Typically our trips are about 8 hours and I’m sure that had we started at our normal time we could have easily doubled our count.