Lake Manitoba Narrows

When weather conditions are bad outside, I sit inside with a roaring fire and remember the time when I was brave enough to tackle the elements, hitch up the boat and head for the river.  The lousier the winter weather, the better the fishing for sauger on the Tennessee River.

Down here in the south we call sauger, “jack salmon”.  As a kid, fishing on the river below Guntersville Dam, I never knew there was such a thing as a sauger until I grew up and read a copy of Field & Stream magazine, and for the first time saw a picture of the fish they called a sauger.  I thought they were confused!

Last year on a dreary, cloudy, cold and miserable morning at daybreak, my brother and I drove down highway 421 from Huntsville, Alabama to the Guntersville dam.  As rotten as the day was, the parking lot just above the launching ramp was filled with cars and trucks with a boat trailer connected to each.  We immediately knew the jacks were biting.

We put the boat in the water about a half mile west of the dam. If I thought I was cold before, I was shocked at how frigid it became as I was zipping down the river at forty miles an hour in the morning fog.  About six miles later, we rounded a bend and as if by magic we ran out of the fog and almost banged into group of at least twenty boats congregated up and down a narrow passage close to the mouth of the Paint Rock River.

The water here was 30 to 40 feet deep where we anchored the boat.  Every few minutes one of the other fishermen would pull in another fish.  Most of the ones being caught were in the 2 pound and under class, though larger ones occasionally were being hauled into boats up and down the river.

My brother was frantically trying to get his tackle together and start fishing.  I was too cold to think of anything other than grabbing the Thermos and pouring myself a cup of hot coffee.  When I  left the house that morning I thought that my brother and I were the only insane people in Alabama, now I was looking at a whole river full of nutty folks!

Saugers tend to congregate around eddy pools such as those coming out of a tributary like the one we were close to that morning.  They are cylindrical fish, light brown speckled, with a couple of dark blotches on their sides. They have two dorsal fins as well as a mouth full of sharp teeth that will lacerate a finger if you are not careful.

In my opinion the jack salmon, as I grew up knowing it, is one of the best tasting fish I have eaten out of southern waters. While the annual spawning run is in April or May, thousands of these tasty fish congregate in the tail waters of the Guntersville Dam, Wheeler Dam and Wilson Dam in earlier months.

Like most of the fishermen I could see, I was also using a heavy jig tipped with a live minnow.  The jigs head was a fluorescent red with a three inch blue haired skirt.  After dropping the rig overboard, I pulled the bait about a foot off the bottom and was reaching for my coffee cup when I felt a tug on the line.

I reeled in a two pound sauger just as my brother had one on also.  Within a couple of hours we had several good sized fish, and then a late morning sun drenched us with welcomed warmth.  The fish stopped biting for us as well as the other boats on the river.

I have been trying to out think fish for years.  Counting the amount of time and money I have spent fishing, it is apparent that the fish have been winning.  Of all the things I have learned is, I still do not know why the sauger population on the river bites better on the most miserable of days, but I have a theory.

www.magicjackincanada.com/magic-jack/

Ice Fishing Lake Manitoba Narrows

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