x
Please confirm your account in order to be able to send messages.
Forgot Password?
NPS Logo DISCOVER SPONSORSHIPS MAPS
NPS Logo
Nigel Touhey
2012-01-23 12:19:46

A Day on Quinte


I'd been looking forward to this trip since we planned it a week or so ago. Charles was going to meet me in Nappanee Saturday night and we were going to get on the ice early Sunday morning. We met up with Pete and Fabian at about 8am or so after making a trip to the tackle shop to pick minnows. We unloaded our gear and made our way out onto Quinte's ice. It was pretty cold on our walk out there but the anticipation of hooking into some of Quinte's legendary Walleye made it well worth the cold walk. After about a 15 minute walk we were on the spot we were going to fish for the day, Pete drilled a few holes and we all picked one and started jigging. It wasn't long before Pete landed the day's first walleye. I thought to myself "this could turn out to be an epic day of fishing". Not too long after, Charles loaded into a big fish and then another one a few minutes later. The day was shaping up to be everything we had anticipated. Then it happened........6 or 7 mind numbing hours of staring at my Humminbird Ice 55 with not a single fish coming across it. By mid-afternoon I began questioning why people fish, when so much of the time we do it, we spend not catching fish. I decided to walk out to Charles, who by this time had wandered out 300-400 yards east of where Pete, Fabian and I were set up. I thought maybe he felt like me, and was ready to throw in the towel and call it a day. Below is our whole conversation: Nigel: "Hey, have you caught anything since this morning" Charles: "Nope, this sucks" Nigel: "How much longer are we going to punish ourselves?" Then Charles glared at me with both pity and disgust at the same time and states that "we're staying here until its dark". So I start my walk back to my bucket and take a seat. I look over at Charles way off in the distance and think, I hate Charles and my life right now and why did I agree to leave my car in Nappanee? Anyway after a few hours of jumping from hole to hole, I decide I'd go back to the hole where Charles caught the two walleye in the morning. I set up my flasher and right away notice some activity on the bottom. I drop my spoon down to 20 feet and right away I catch a big perch. I sat in that hole for the next hour and a half and ended up landing 4 more "super-sized" perch. Then, all of a sudden all the perch activity shut down so I figured since I am a perch master, I must have caught them all, or they moved on. Then it happened, a big red light moved off bottom and rushed my spoon. It was the first big hit for me all day and when I set into it I knew it was no perch. I yelled to Charles that I had something big on and he began to run over to me. Now I have been fishing with Charles for about four years now and have never seen the man move so fast, he resembled a gazelle running across the plains of Africa, amazing, only his legs moving!!! Charles helped me pull the biggest walleye I have ever caught through the ice. After we resuscitated Charles, and brought his heart rate back to normal levels, he took the picture for me. All in all it was a good day on the ice and I learned a couple of valuable lessons. Never leave your car 10 km from the lake and if you do, don't whine about going home early because you just might miss catching your personal best fish. We had an awesome sunset at the end of the day too. Thanks for reading! Nigel
0 anglers like this post
Jan 24, 2012 24/01/12
Nigel Touhey
Chris, I was in there, but I wasn't coming out. I felt like the kid from "A Christmas Story". I may have over layered, so I wasn't my usual nimble self.
Jan 24, 2012 24/01/12
Chris Hockley
Nigel... are you in that photo somewhere? lol. What a great story and I can only imagine (being the approximate same size as Charles) the amount of time and effort it would have taken to bring him back. Good on you for the effort. Great report!
Jan 23, 2012 23/01/12
Bryan Low
Great report and awesome fish man!
CONTACT US
© National Prostaff    Terms · Privacy