The River

October 18, 2010

So I live in the west suburbs of Chicago and the largest body of water around where I live is the Fox river. Let me tell you something river fishing is hard.

I first went out on October 10th 2010 with my buddy Mike. He knows it all from my perspective so he taught me a few things. First was how to fish with live bait in the river. Hook up a minnow toss on a bobber and wait for a bite. Seems simple. It isnt.

In order to fish a river it is really hard for me to figure out where the fish are. Lakes are easy for me for some reason I can kind of just figure out where they are, it is a little intuition for me. Rivers are harder for me. There is a dam in Geneva and Mike showed me fish were around there. I caught a small white bass and a little small mouth. Then we hit a wall and the water was pretty low and no fish seemed to be found.

I just dont fish the river very well. I try not to get discouraged and Mike let me have the first cast in all of his favorite fishing holes he showed me (a very generous proposition for any anger to first give up his fishing holes and second let his buddy cast first but that is the kind of guy Mike is) and I had only 2 fish in about 3 hours of fishing.

The last place we stopped I got the catch of the day a nice sized smallmouth that just hit my minnow. It was fun reeling the fish in and I was proud of my catch.

I've been back to the river several times since and walked away with no, zero, zinch, zilch fish. The river is not easy to master...