Fishing helps bring them home for the holidays

WE WERE struggling to find a decent number of crappies in any area on a late morning outing in December, moving from deep hole to deep hole and barely marking a fish on the vertical electronics.
A half-dozen stops got us several rock bass and a half-dozen bluegills, and the absence of at least one larger school of “slabbers” was puzzling.
But we stayed mobile and kept looking for any sort of deeper structure, even shoreline-related, in hopes of changing our luck. We honestly ended up somewhere entirely new, found a couple of old holes, and started drilling.
The first drop of the depth finder showed like 27 feet of water and marks off the bottom, a welcome sight. The first drop of a minnow on a jig produced an 11-inch crappie, another welcome sight.
It was game on.
We spent the next three hours hauling in a mixture of crappies, bluegills and perch, and the action was pretty much nonstop.
Son Steve and grandson Alexander had trekked with the family from Minnesota on Christmas morning, an unprecedented move aimed at taking advantage of a brief warm spell over the holidays.
The action was so good that even granddaughter Adri and Steve’s wife, Jess, got in on the crappies and bluegills.
We didn’t even have to put out bobbers or tip-downs, mostly fishing a single jigging rod with some sort of tungsten jig tipped with either a minnow or wax worm.
I don’t recall ever fishing on Christmas Day before, not the sort of tradition I’d suggest starting unless my only goal was to upset my wife. And that’s not the case.
But this was not my plan, yet I had a duty to support the kids and grandkids in whatever fits their schedule for a holiday get-together.
And yes, I was snickering as those words were written. Any excuse to get together with the family is a good one, and if it happens to involve fishing on one of the most significant holidays of the year, so be it.
To put it all into perspective, a plan to come the weekend before Christmas was postponed due to a cold spell that would make fishing uncomfortable for a couple of big-city teenagers who could use more outside time.
And even if they did fish in the Shakopee area, the biggest metro crappies measure about eight inches and the bluegills are even smaller. Besides the smaller fish, the lakes are crowded with anglers.
So they relish the opportunity to come to northern Wisconsin, where 11-inch crappies and 8-9 inch bluegills are somewhat common.
We fished for three days in those above-average temperatures which, by Friday afternoon, had turned the entire lake surface to standing water. The bite was on and off, and the fish very mobile, but it was still great until virtually the last minute we fished on that Friday.
Of course, we enjoyed the normal Christmas holiday things, exchanging gifts, playing games, eating way too much, throwing cards and just spending time together. But those things happened after dark, mostly, because they came to fish.