Annual Crosswinds Trip

I have created blog entries before about Crosswinds, and I will continue to do so yearly because this is an annual trip we look forward to. It used to be just myself and Danielle doing this, but after Ashton was born, Kevin replaced Danielle. Eventually, the family will be old enough and work schedules will align where we can all start doing this trip together.

As in the past, the main goal of this trip is to catch enough burbot to host our annual fish fry. I have finally learned over the years that we don’t need to keep our limit to supply enough meat for the fish fry. The past years we have had too much and a huge amount of left overs (not to mention a lot of time to prepare and fry up extra fish). This year I decided I only needed to keep 5 large burbot. I’m fairly sure this will be enough fish for the fish fry with minimal left overs. We shall see.

The trip almost didn’t happen this year. I was very nauseous on Tuesday and couldn’t eat or drink anything really all of Wednesday and Thursday. I started to feel a little better on Friday and I really didn’t want to bail on Kevin (and have to get fish for the fish fry a different way). I decided to go knowing I would likely start to feel better but I let Kevin know I would likely be a sack of potatoes.

We loaded everything the night before so we could get an early start on Saturday morning. We left around 5AM hoping to be on the trail around sun rise. On our way north, we actually saw a large black wolf run across the road in front of. That was pretty cool to see; unfortunately we couldn’t get a picture taken quick enough.

The ride in was actually very smooth compared to other times. I was glad to see this because a bumpy ride is the opposite of what my stomach needed! One thing that was worse than prior years was frozen overflow. There were a couple places where we got stuck or slid off the trail due to the ice.

We got to our camping spot in good time. I forget how quick it is to actually ride somewhere when you don’t have to slow down for a dog running along side you. Once we got to our spot, we had remove a 12x12 area of snow to place the tent. The snow was a couple feet deep and my body was empty of calories. I tried my best to help, but Kevin had to do most of the clearing because I wore out too quick.

We eventually got the area cleared and the tent setup. When we were putting everything into the tent, we realized that there was some miscommunication between Kevin and I. We both think it’s the other person’s fault so I won’t give you a biased reason why, but in summary, we didn’t have the right equipment to set up our bunk cots. This meant we had to sleep on the ground the entire trip. We thought it would be cold sleeping directly on the ice, but it turned out to not be too bad.

Our next order of business was finding a good place to put the fishing hut for burbot jigging, as well as setup the tip-ups. I had a GPS location saved from the year prior where we jigged for burbot, but we were surprised to find it was only 5 feet deep. We thought our spot was 10 feet deep but we decided try it out anyway because we already set up all of our gear and it would have took a while to move.

It wasn’t quite dark yet so we got all the tip-ups set as well. We decided to fish some of the deeper holes for Lake Trout while we waited for sunset. Lucky us we hooked into a couple of nice ones.

The sun was finally setting so we transitioned to inside the hut. Last year, the fishing was great and we didn’t think it could be any better this year. Thankfully… we were wrong… it was better! As soon as the sun set, the burbot showed up. We quickly caught our limit of 5 burbot each and moved to catch and release fishing. We also had to pull all the tip ups out of the water because burbot typically swallow those hooks and we didn’t want a burbot swallowing a hook when we couldn’t keep it now. It’s a bunch of work to set tip ups, and we had to pull them shortly after setting them… but that’s ok because that’s a good problem to have.

The good things about the burbot bite being hot is that you can experiment with presentations. In doing this, I have now found my new favorite lure (sorry, I can’t share). I bought this lure thinking it may work good for trout and descent for everything else, but I soon found out that the burbot absolutely hammer it! Fishing 3 feet from another lure (Kevin’s) also helps for comparison… and it hurts their feelings too when I’m catching all the fish J

Since we hammered the burbot the night before, we really didn’t have much planned for the rest of the trip. We decided to sleep in and target lake trout on different parts of the lake during the days. At night, we would catch and release more burbot which was a blast, especially because the first night was probably the worst night of fishing!

Overall it was a fun, extended weekend. We got plenty of meat to supply the fish fry with!  

I think this was the first fish of the trip... a Lake Trout we caught while waiting for the sun to set on the first day. 

Check out these ice crystals that formed on our stuff over night. 

More ice crystals. 

Enjoying the sun.

Not a beast Lake Trout... but not too shabby. 

This was the biggest burbot of the trip. It's not the best picture but you can see the size. 

I found this cool grate that we can attach to the buddy heater. It allows us to cook and warm up food. We decided to warm up some moose summer sausage and man was it good!

I was fishing this hole often during the day. I kept seeing big fish on the flasher (fish finder) until one finally hammered my jig. He hammered it so hard he broke the line when I set the hook :( I then tied on a different jig and fished the same hole. I knew that big fish likely wouldn't come back, so I was looking for a different monster. Well I found one! You can tell from this picture that the next fish I hooked in to broke my pole. I ended up loosing him when I tried to reel him in too. That made two large fish in a row that I didn't land!! 

This is the view from our tent on a snowy day. You can see how far away the hut is... kind of weird it was only 5 feet of water there. 

Home sweet home for the weekend.

One of Kevin's burbot. Looks like he pulled it completely straight for the picture. 

This is an aftermath picture. I had to hang all of our gear in the garage to dry it out. Unfortunately, my ceiling rod holders weren't secure enough and the heavy, wet tent brought the whole thing down. 

Check out this video of a burbot I caught. This guy had a nasty cut under his jaw that the the lake lie and warms found. Hungry anyone? I didn't keep this fish :)