FENCEROWS...Somewhere in January
By John Luthens
The ice was coming on nicely in the area lakes and the pan fish and northern pike were coming up through comfortably deep holes. My jig poles and tip-ups were resting contentedly in a bucket and my portable shanty was happily tucked in a white blanket of snow in my truck bed.
Then came freezing rain and the white powdery covers were thrown from my shanty. The canvas cover of the shelter crackled and glistened in the old truck. I needed an ice pick to excavate to the bottom of the ice fishing bucket, like a winter archeologist excavating for lost Eskimo artifacts.
I lazily decided that archeology is too much work, leaving the gear undiscovered for a few days, and wouldn’t you know that Mother Nature changed her mind again, raising the temperatures into the upper reaches and thawing out the frozen expanses of the truck bed fishing pile. It was warm enough to wear shorts. My ice shanty was back from its icy hibernation, but to no avail, because the wind howled loud enough to scare me off the heaving ice cracks of the lakes.
January fishing in Wisconsin had become too confusing. I was about to give the whole thing up, sell it all off and move to a warm and deserted island in the Pacific and play Robinson Crusoe for the remainder of my days.
Then I ran into Captain Todd, a long-time acquaintance from the Fox River Valley. After a quick glimpse at the picture of the walleye he held in his outstretched hands, I scrapped the island plan and began devising a new one. I decided Wisconsin was fine and dandy after all. I was going fishing on the Fox River; crazy January weather be damned.
Now I don’t think Captain Todd is a real captain, but he ought to be. I run into him at a certain junction point in Oshkosh from time to time, where the upper Fox joins the brawling Wolf River into the Lakes of Butte des Morts and Poygan.
He knows where the system empties into Lake Winnebago through Oshkosh. He’s familiar with the backwaters, where the Fox exits Winnebago, flowing through the Fox Cities of Neenah, Menasha and Appleton, flowing north and cutting channels, jumping down locks and dams, before finding its way up to its Lake Michigan exit into Green Bay.
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| “January fishing on the Fox” |
Captain Todd fishes the Fox system and Lake Winnebago with equal abandon for perch, crappie and bluegill. Bullhead, sheephead and other rough fish are not immune to his fish finding GPS coordinates-but his coordinates invariably lead to walleye on the end of a stringer and are, in fact, the stuff of local legend. Some of us have even gone so far as to say the coordinates don’t exist at all, which I’ve come to believe is exactly the way Captain Todd wants it.
This all ties into the picture of the 20-some inch walleye that Captain Todd showed me, and why I can’t tell you the exact location of where I went to chase after some like-minded pictures of my own. I was sworn to secrecy, and while I generally don’t mind kissing and telling- it’s just that then Captain Todd won’t take me anywhere on his boat again-there are no second chances, and I can kiss his magical GPS goodbye forever.
“The fish are wintering it out in there - stacked up like cordwood,” Captain Todd told me. “They’ll take anything, as long as it’s a white twister tail, and night time is the right time” he added.
That much I’m allowed to tell you.
That, and the fact that it was January in the open and flowing river of the lower Fox, somewhere between Lake Winnebago and Green Bay-only 40 miles or so of water, containing somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 dams, and with one of the highest concentrations of pulp and paper mills in the world.
Oh, and there were minor details about crawling through an abandoned warehouse in order to get to the exact place.
I forgot the twister tail, ignoring the first part of Captain Todd’s advice. I opted for my fly rod and a mess of new walleye flies that I’d been impatient to try out. I’m scared of abandoned warehouses after dark- so that’s the second direct order I disobeyed. Besides, it took me the better part of two afternoons to even find the warehouse.
There were semi-trucks coming and going, and it looked like a mill was in full production mode on the banks of the secret fishing hole. A high fence topped with barbed wire protected a solitary point jutting out into the rushing Fox River, with the warehouse on one side and a frozen side channel on the other. The warehouse boarded up with its foundation open to the river, concrete pilings driven into the river bed with water rushing and curling around them. As far as being a scenic destination, it probably won’t grace the cover of a travel-destination magazine cover, but “walleyes stacked up like cordwood” pretty much sells itself without the help of any pictures.
I looked left and right, feeling a little like I was trespassing with a knapsack on my back and my fly rod case in my hand. The truck drivers were going about there business and didn’t seem to care one way or another about a solitary urban fisherman.
I could have squeezed below, crawling below the warehouse through the pilings and out to the river point. I still love adventure, but I guess I’m getting a little old for the high end of the crazy spectrum. I assessed the situation and backed out of the warehouse foundation cave.
Looking around the opposite side of the point, I saw that I could skirt the barbed wire by sliding out into the icy side channel and holding onto the end of the fence for support-just in case the ice was not in the mood to fully support me. Getting older makes you heavier and wiser, even if it takes away some of the crazy. The channel ice was solid, and soon I was standing on Captain Todd’s promised fishing point, with the sun setting over one of the Fox City (I’m not allowed to tell you which one) skylines.
I twitched walleye flies slowly through the tail end of the deep pool below the point. The bottom was cut deep with rocks and looked like walleye heaven. The water was cold enough to ice the rod guides. I sucked out formed crystals like a popsicle on every other cast. It was hard to tell if I was getting subtle strikes, or if it was just the line dragging on the iced guides. I’ll say I was getting strikes, even though I never landed a fish. If you fly fish in January, you take whatever positives you can get.
As I was packing up, another fisherman came sliding across the icy channel. It was getting dark. He had a bucket of crappie minnows for one rod, and a twister tail lure on the other. I watched him catch five nice perch in a row on the minnows, and he landed two smaller walleye with the twister tail.
“It used to be a lot better in here,” he told me. “The problem is that too many people know about this place, and the wintered- up walleye can only stand so much fishing pressure. By the way, who are you, and how did you find out about it?”
“I’m a writer, and I heard about it from Captain Todd,” I answered
“I’ve never heard of you, and I’ve never heard of him,” said the fisherman.
That’s exactly the way me and Captain Todd like it. I watched him set the hook and pull in another walleye, this one a little bigger.
“It’s really a night bite,” he added.
I headed for home, leaving the wise fisherman to his stacked-up winter walleyes, somewhere in January on the Fox River-somewhere.