Friday, April 30, 2010

Opening Trout Season in Wisconsin A Day Early And a $100 Less!

Well tomorrow will be the opening day for fishing season here in the North Woods. Trout is the fish of the day! Even though we purchased our fishing license today we will not be on the water in the morning or the afternoon or the evening. Alas since we have moved north we have been fishing maybe twice the last 3 1/2 years. Before we moved North we would be fishing about every weekend. What happened? Well buying a house with lots of yard is the answer. we've done massive landscaping in the summer and in the winter did things to improve the inside. Granted the house was only four years old when we purchased it, we still had to make it our own. I think we are just about there! This winter we finished the lower level with a walkout basement. This goes directly to a fire pit area. Then a small pond area with a retaining wall.
Enough of that, back to the fishing. We did do some early season trout fishing in our small pond and that's what we had for supper tonight. John had the plan to stock 100 5"-6" trout in the pond. Sounds like a good idea. Well I talked him down to 50 I actually only wanted maybe 25, but ended up with 53 little fishies. We got them from a local fish farm not far from here. Got them home along with $30.00 of fish food and put them into their new home. Everyone seemed quite pleased with their new surroundings. Everything went very well for the first few days until the water turned from my Caribbean blue to a slimly green. I noticed that the fish mainly stayed around the aerator and seldom swam to the other end of the 22' pool. Alas, we have no fish. John filleted them. Our thought was they were not getting enough oxygen, even though the fishfarmer said we could have 100 fish in that size pond. A few minutes after John took them out of the pond and put them in a pail of water they met their demise. While John cleaned fish, I cleaned the pond out-completely! taking all the water out and cleaning the sides and bottom, then refilling with water. I now have my Caribbean blue water back. Thank God!
Our fish fry tonight only cost us $15 and some pride.