Visit from my brother

This is a bit of a late post. My older brother was in Wisconsin last weekend for some skiing, and was able to spend a night at my place Friday and go ice fishing with me the next morning. I took him to the triangle hoping it would be a sure thing. No such luck, we didn't get a single bite. We did, however, have a lot of fun with my roommate's new camera. There were bluegill everywhere you turned, about a foot off the bottom. It was encouraging to know that the fish were down there, because without the camera, we wouldn't have known if it was a slow day, or if we had picked a bad spot, or if we were fishing at the wrong depth, or if we were just terrible fishermen. Turns out it was just a slow day. You'll have that. Besides the bluegill, we saw a couple largemouth, one perch, and 3 or 4 big muskies swim by. One of the muskies swam so close to the camera that the side of his head took up the entire monitor. That was cool!


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Ice fishing at the triangle

Chuck and I took the shanty out to the triangle on Monona this morning for some pre-Christmas ice fishing. We joined the already sizable village of ice shacks around 7am, and had our jigs in the water by the time it started getting light. Visablity was pretty good, probably about 6 or 7 feet. The fishing started out slow, but eventually Chuck began to catch a few. None for me, but that was ok, I was sure they'd come eventually. Chuck kept catching them - more and more were being added to the bucket to take home. Still none for me! I was starting to get worried, but around 9am I caught my first fish, a small one. I didn't want to make a big deal about it, but I was pretty excited, considering that Sept. 6th was the last time I caught a fish. A few minutes later I caught another, this one was pretty big at 7 1/2 inches. It ended up being our last fish, we packed up around 10am, satisfied with our catch. Fried bluegill for lunch, good stuff. :)

Ice fishing will be here soon

As of last Wednesday we now have 18 inches (45.7 cm) of snow on the ground. Temperatures were down to -4 deg F (-20 deg C) last night.

I bet the lakes are freezing. :)



(pic taken from my house Wednesday morning)

Keeping the aquarium clean and the fish healthy

Thanks for the comments. About keeping the aquarium clean and the fish healthy:

1. I use two Whisper filters that are each rated for up to 30 gallons, in a 29 gallon aquarium. I felt this was important because I’m breaking the rule of thumb not to have more than 1 inch of fish per gallon of water. The fish I have came from a fast moving stream, so I'm sure they appreciate as much oxygen and water movement as possible.

2. I feed gold fish flakes to the dace (the darters won't touch flakes), and then I throw in a cube of frozen bloodworms (i.e. mosquito larvae). The darters and logperch go into a frenzy over the bloodworms, and afterwards there is rarely anything left to get sucked into the filter or settle into the gravel. Uneaten food is the quickest way to make the water nasty.

3. I change out 5 gallons of water about once every other week, and then maybe once a month I’ll take the fish out, stir the gravel up so all the crap floats up, and then change out around ¾ of the water before stuff has a chance to settle back down.

4. I wait as long as possible to change out the carbon filters, because they’re expensive. I take them out once a week and rinse them out in the sink to get big stuff off them.

Aquarium update

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Hi guys.

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My fishing gear has been put away for months, but I got the itch to post something, so I thought I'd give an update on my native fish aquarium. The darters got moved to the 30 gallon aquarium, and are doing fantastic. According to my latest census, there are about a dozen orangethroat darters, one fantail darter, two logperch, three southern redbelly dace, and one madtom (not sure what kind he is). Some good news is that I have not lost a single darter that I caught back in May! Last weekend while I was visiting my parents in Illinois, I caught the dace and a few extra darters to add to the aquarium. Everyone is getting along, everyone is eating, and everyone is looking healthy and showing some pretty vibrant colors.

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My back is getting better, slowly.

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I'm looking forward to ice fishing!

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Cheers,

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Ben

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