Nestor Falls Report - Jan. 15, 16, 17

[Animal]

We stayed at Crawford's on Crow Lake. Fished LOW the afternoon of Jan. 15 for Crappie, which were was on the bite. Fish hit the best on small fire tiger jigs. Two of us caught 75 in about 3 hours. We kept limits of nice 13 inch average fish. Temps were mild and snow was falling.

On Friday, Jan. 16th we awoke to 6 more inches on snow. We decided that we would go to Otterskin due to the snow cover on Crow (18 inches) and lack of any other snowmobile traffic. We found lots of slush which proved somewhat challenging to pull through while dragging the Otters. Otterskin had heavy snow over 4 to 6 inches of slush.

Fishing on Otterskin produced 8 trout in 5 hours caught on white tubes, yellow tubes and a black and white buck tail. It snowed heavily the whole time we were there adding about 4 more inches of snow. At 3:00 pm we decided to pack up and head back because of the slush and visibility. It was a good thing we did. My sled got bogged down in slush after traveling about ¼ mile and we had to walk back to the fishing hole to get another guy going. Another sled got bogged down about 100 yards from the portage. It took us about 1 hour to travel 2 miles. Cameron was easy to cross. Crow had lots of slush and took about an hour to cross. The slush was bad in many places. I was down to 2-4 MPH and rocking my sled many times.

The next day (Sat) our sleds were frozen solid. My sled started up and then lost its spark. We couldn’t get it going. Given the conditions on Crow and the other lakes we decided to fish LOW again where the Crappie bite was on again. When we came back Crawford’s the group in the cabin next to us had to leave there tents out on the ice because their sleds wouldn’t pull them through the slush.

[Kingfisher]

Animal; Thanks for your very interesting fishing report. We were slushed in on Stormy many years ago, we stayed in a trappers cabin on Snake Bay, the only way we got off the lake was the lead snowmobile pulled a steel pack sled and we ran another sled up against the pack sled and pushed, worked perfect.

[This message has been edited by Kingfisher (edited 01-21-2004).]

[jerkin'm]

Sounds like a royal pain. What sort of sleds were you running? Been through heavy snow and slush on crow w/longtrack AC panthers and bearcats never a problem? Sounds like the other guys need to learn to rough it a little and pack lighter, we have found that towing stuff is for the birds and have racks that hold all of our gear.

[Animal]

I run a Panther and the other guys were running an EXT and a Polaris 440 Indy. We just ran into the perfect storm. Lots of fresh snow over several inches of new slush with temps in the mid-teens preventing freeze up.