There have been so many good ones, it's hard to think of those that qualify as being unique enough to write about here.
1. Circa 1986 timeframe, Lake Sak had a fast rise in water levels going through June which flooded a ton of shoreline covered in sweet clover, especially in the Little Knife Bay area. Walleyes were right up in the sweet clover for all of June and a good part of July (until it started decaying). Buddies and I were using an old 16 ft boat with a 3.9 hp Mercury motor to catch easy limits of 3-10 lb eyes using leeches or minnows behind a willow tail spinner. On days when the wind wasn't right, we would zip across the lake to fish the cabin sites area and there would be times walleyes literally would wash up on shore in a two foot wave and then roll back into the surf. Good times!
2. Back when I first started fishing Alkaline Lake, the pike fishing was insane. I'd take my young son fishing there and we would just troll cranks for a few hours, catching 10 pike to every keepable walleye. It'd take a couple of hours of fishing to catch a limit of eyes, and we would end up donating a few cranks on each trip to the fishing gods as pike bit us off or just tore up the rapalas. That was until I discovered the Knot Too Kinky titanium wire for thwarting the pike, good stuff! I am not sure whatever happened to the pike in that lake but they have tamed down quite a bit over the years, but for a couple years it was nuts.
3. Last summer a buddy and I tried a little lake in central ND with good stocking reports. Yep, we found them. I think I went to that lake 5 times and each time it was a pretty easy limit of 18+ inch fish, with all but one time including a fish between 24 and 27 inches. On the last trip I was there, we caught near our limit in 45 minutes, then we placed a friendly wager on who would catch the first fish over 24 inches. We spent over two hours playing catch and release with 18-22 inch walleyes, pretty awesome way to spend a few hours, but we never did catch that one bigger fish that day.
4. Must have been around 2007-2009, I put in at the Rifle Range south of Bismarck on the Missouri. Just planned on going out for a few hours by myself. Ran into a college kid fishing at the ramp who wasn't having much luck as I dunked the boat, so I asked him if wanted to join me for a couple hours pulling cranks. Might have been the best fishing day of his life as we literally caught well over 100 walleyes up shallow next to an island a couple miles south of the ramp. Mostly they were 10-13 inch fish, but we ended up keeping 10 in the 15-16 inch range.
5. Pitching jigs on the downstream side of a sandbar near Heskitt one year I found a very small spot where the water fell off the sandbar and down into a 12-14 ft hole with lots of current. If you tossed a jig up on the bar and let the current carry it down into the eddy, you either caught a fish or missed it on every...single...cast. I went through a lot of minnows fishing that spot until the sandbar eroded enough to put the fun to an end.
Despite all these great trips and extended hot bites, I still find the time to occasionally go out and get skunked. Damnit!
