Dubuque Area Mississippi

[gloomiseye]

Good info guys! Good luck if you go tomorrow nightmare.

[FishNightmare]

Didn't go to pool 12, went to 13 for a change. Not too far so report will still help out. Did a lot better. Ended up with 24 total between all of us. Mostly sauger and the size was better. Did get a few nice walleyes though all around 18". They gota be either in early spawn or getting close. Still not the greatest yet though, but can only get better now. Plastics were a waist of time. All live bait tipped with a stinger hook to. We went through a few scoops of minnows cuz they were just nipping at it all day. The water temp was 43 at the start of the day, but after that crazy wind it went down to 40.

Even cooked them all up and had a little fish fry. They tasted great.

Going out wensday to see what I can get, have a few more stinger hooks this time to so hopefully don't loose so many minnows.

[JIvers]

I wound up fishing the tailwaters below the lock and dam at Dubuque this past Sunday morning. That was not the plan, but when I pulled in to the parking lot at Bellevue before sunrise the parking lot at the DNR office was literally full of rigs, with a bunch of boats already launched and beached just below the lock wall. This was on October 25, not October 18 when the walleye tournament was held at Bellevue. (I knew to stay away on that day.)

I don't know if this was some local tournament not posted on-line or what, but it would have been an hour or more wait to launch. These boats all looked like walleye rigs to me, so I am guessing there would have been thirty or more boats fishing in the tailwaters at Bellevue once they all got in the water. I thought it over, and decided I was better off going up to Dubuque.

Once I got up to the dam at Dubuque, I fished out from the lock on the west side for a bit, and had no luck at all. There were probably ten other boats out there, and I did not see a single fish go in any of them. I had enough of that, and decided to head over to the east side and see if there were any fish biting in the slack water there. There weren't. I got a couple of hits out in deeper water after the shallows produced nothing, but I never hooked anything and do not like pulling small saugers out of 28'+, so I did not stay in the deepr water for long.

A couple hours of that was enough, so I trailered the boat and headed home. The score for my first trip of the fall to the Mississippi tailwaters: 190 or so miles on the odometer, and no fish in the boat. I don't know if it was the weather front that blew through on Saturday with clear skies in it's wake, or if it has just not been cold enough yet, but I am confident I will do much better whenever I make it to a lock and dam again this fall.

[JIvers]

The lastest round of rain is pushing the Mississippi in most of Iowa right back up after it had been slowly dropping. Looks like it may get close to flood stage by Christmas in Dubuque: http://rivergages.mvr.usace.army.mil/WaterControl/shefgraph-forecast2.cfm?sid=MI11&fid=DLDI4&d=7&dt=S

With El Niño killing the ice-fishing season so far, I was hoping to get my boat out on the tailwaters in Dubuque, Guttenberg, or Bellevue soon. Now I can go ahead and winterize it.