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Harv’s contribution to my list of first time ever happenings were a nice channel catfish that struck his spinner while we fished on a different bar. Not long before Bryce’s adventure, Harv, his dad, added a notch to my mixed bag belt too. When Bryce first hooked up, he feared being snagged in the rocks, but something didn’t look right to me, the reel’s drag was not spinning, and the rod was throbbing, giving me the sense that something big was on the hook obviously there was.

The screen image of the structure, a mid-lake bar that topped off at about 12 feet deep offered no clue that we’d catch that fish. The buffalo, the first one ever caught in my boat, struck a spinner tipped with a fathead minnow while we were fishing for walleyes. We did not have a scale to weigh the 32-inch fish, but I can tell you it was heavy, and it reminded me of holding a bag of water softener salt. The depth of the fish isn’t fully realized either, to me, it seemed like the circumference would be greater than the length. The bright sunshine, combined with photos being snapped quickly didn’t capture the deep, silvery blue hues and highlights. The photo of the Bigmouth Buffalo you see here does not do this fish justice. His parents Harv and Jodi held their own too, but somehow Bryce just keeps winding up catching the biggest, sometimes the most, and this year, the most unusual.

As it happened, the fish must have gotten a memo that all 3 days were his birthday and they gifted him accordingly. Even after all these years, the past few days proved to me that the term “mixed bag” has still never been fully realized!īryce Demuth started his fishing trip at age 11 on Monday and finished it at age 12 on Wednesday. If I keep the boat on lakes that have walleyes in them, we usually get enough, and along the way, who knows what else we’ll catch. You’ve read plenty of times about how I love the mixed bag, multi-species action bite. Family fishing trips, especially multiple day trips, usually offer me an excuse to combine the pursuit of walleye with other popular fish species.
