It's Been a Long Road to the Longnose Sucker, Fish #42!

This April I drove to the Ammonoosuc River in search of spawning Longnose Suckers.
I put on my waders and entered the freezing river with my trusty spear. I never saw one, despite reports that I was in their spawning grounds. I returned every other day for the next two months. Never saw a single spawning fish.

Today I took a ride north to hunt a different fish, Northern Redbelly dace. My kids encouraged me to stop so they could take a swim in the river. I found a great looking spot and let them go.

 After staring at the water for a few minutes I tied on a #22 hook and tipped it with a sliver of worm. Immediately a hoard of blacknose dace attacked the worm. They reminded me of the Zombies in World War Z. They swarmed and attacked I caught loads of them.

I was in a fishing trance and after a short time I was able to see another type of fishing swimming below the dace. I tried dozens of times to get my bait past the hoard but it was no use, I had to try something different.

If you look closely you can see two tiny suckers next to the leaf on the rock

So I slipped my split shot up against the hook (I usually keep a few inches between the two) the extra weight did the trick i was able to get the worm to the bottom. The small fish on the bottom began nudging the bait. I sat and waited, eventually one of them sucked in the tiny hook and I set the hook. The fish flew from the water and landed at my feet.

I had a new species Longnose Sucker (Catostomus catostomus) Fish number 42 in our quest to catch and eat every kind of freshwater fish in New Hampshire. We haven't decided how to cook it yet, but stay tuned, this fish deserves a great recipe.

White Fish Hunting... AGAIN!

We spent a good deal of time on Silver Lake on Saturday in search of the Mighty Whitefish.

For those of you following our quest, you'll remember that we've been fishing Silver Lake in Madison for three years looking for this fish... so far we've caught Bass, Perch, Sunfish, Pickerel and Lake Trout but no sign of the whitefish.

Dave is determined to catch this fish!

Our hopes as always were very high when we headed out, but it was extremely windy which made it nearly impossible to get our lines down to the fish. Whitefish spend time in the cold depths of the lake, we were fishing between 60 and 150 feet of water. Our fish finder was saying we were near the fish, but the wind caused our boat to move so fast that our lures were waterskiing behind the boat as we sailed across the lake.

Catch of the Day!

So we are dealing with another epic failure, but we are resilient and will rally!

If you want to hear the full story take a listen to our latest podcast.

Best Fish Nerds Podcast So Far! Naked Sunbather Story!

http://www.fishnerds.com/fn-podcast-8-whitefish-naked-sunbathers-wunder-boner-and-god/

Happy Father's Day

Cool video posted on Fish Nerds: Fishing with a camera!

Awesome stuff! http://www.fishnerds.com/fish-nerd-ingenuity/

We are Podcasters!

You may have noticed that we have not been hanging around here at Catch-M-All the blog lately... but don't despair, we are around. Catch-M-All is growing and we are now re-vamping ourselves as the Fish Nerds!

We have a new website www.fishnerds.com and even more exciting than that is our new Podcast!

 Check out our podcasts!
Listen here or subscribe on
iTunes
https://itunes.apple.com/kn/podcast/fish-nerds/id643687501

Episode 6!  

Episode 5!  

Episode 4! 

Episode 3!
 Episode 2!

 Episode 1!

The Great White Hope..

Winter is drawing to a close, the sap is running and maple sugaring is taking us away from some of the best fishing of the season, but we had to get out after Whitefish one more time before the ice is out.

http://fish.dnr.cornell.edu/nyfish/Salmonidae/lake_whitefish.html

As usual we stopped into the local bait shop for advice, in this case it was Silver Hardware in Madison. We were excited to see they had a great tank of minnows and plenty of spare fishing gear. Even better than that they had a fish nerd working. Ken seemed to know just about everything about Silver Lake and gave us some great advice on where to find the right waters for whitefish. We bought a dozen minnows, took his advice and headed out the the spot.

One Small Step for Clay

As we walked out on the Silver Lake boat ramp, we chatted with a bunch of old timers fishing for Rainbows, they gave us the same advice as Ken, in fact one of them claimed to have caught a whitefish 3 years ago at that spot. Our hopes were rising!

Walking was easy, the wind was blowing a warm breeze, it was nearing 50 degrees and we were happy to be fishing in the Shadow of Mt. Chocurrua.

Dave started drilling, Clay started measuring the depth and looking for fish on his sonar. We set a couple of fish traps and kept drilling and measuring.

Marcum Showdown Ice Troller, sounding for fish

Now it was jig time, we were alternating jigs with waxworms, minnows and butterworms. We started in water that was 30 feet deep and planned to fish as deep as possible then work our way shallow again. We've been told whitefish like sitting on the ridges between deep and shallow. We were not going to spend more than ten minutes at each hole.

Dave's High Tech Jigging Station

We jigged and moved, moved and jigged, deep water, shallow water... And our efforts were ignored.
Then in 18 feet of water our sonar lit up with fish, our hopes grew again. We knew there was no whitefish this shallow, but we had to catch at least one fish before the day was over.

Dave jigged, we could see the little fish chasing his offerings up on the sonar. But he was having trouble closing the deal, so he brought out the big guns, he was going to jig with two rods in one 4.5inch hole.

Looks like something bigger took a bite of this while Dave was reeling it in

It worked, fish on, we danced, we cheered and we landed the beast. Baby Beast of a yellow perch.

The sun was low in the sky, we tucked our tails and left the ice in defeat. Now that Clay has a boat, we will come back in the heat of the summer and jig in the deepest hole in the lake... We will not be defeated by this fish!

Grateful for easy fishing!

We don't fish as much as we want to, so it's really great to know a few good spots that will practically guarantee us a good amount of fish.



This past Saturday we had an opportunity to teach an introduction to ice fishing course at Wiggins Memorial Library in Stratham NH.

Given how much we love to talk, we were eager to get out and talk about ourselves and hopefully we gave  a few good tips.

After the course we had a couple hours of daylight left and had to get onto the ice, and we did!

Enjoy this video and pictures and try to get out before the ice is gone, in Northern NH there is probably a month left, in the south... who knows!