The Big Chip, Lake Chippewa Flowage, Wisconsin

Oil painting of a scene from the Big Chip, Lake Chippewa Flowage, northern Wisconsin. The dimensions are 18″ by 14″.

Blue Gill Stream

This 12″ X 9″ oil painting is of an unnamed blue gill stream in the Missouri Ozarks.

Rushing Water

This is a oil painting of a river in south west Arkansas just off if HW 71. I stopped there to photograph a bait shop along side the highway and saw this river behind the shop. The painting is 24″ X 16″.

Break Time

This is a 14″ X 10″ oil painting I did recently. A boat is tied up in slow water under a tree. It’s time for a break.

Canadian Lake Beaver Lodge

This is a 24″ X 11″ oil painting of a Canadian fishing lake. We were fishing for walleye. The local guide kept saying jig, jig, jig, … We used half ounce jif heads with minnows.

Colorado Fishing Stream

This is an oil painting of a Colorado fishing stream. It’s a little 10″ X 9″ painting I did today. There is a little touch of snow and ice in the stream.

Arkansas Stream

This is a 12″ X 9″ oil painting of a stream along US 71 highway south of Fort Smith.

Trees and Stream

This is a small 6″ X 6″ oil painting. Done mostly in blue and green.

Fishing Streams

To stand on a bank or wade a stream is a great way to fish. It’s a lot simpler than using a boat. The first time I fished a stream was in Cedar Creek, Missouri. It was from a stone bluff that was just downstream from the remains of the dam for an old mill. Large stones were remaining across the creek and caused turbulence as the water flowed over and around the stones. I’m not a fish so I don’t know for sure but it sure seems like they like to swim up to big stones in the water and hang out there. That’s where we used to catch them.

For many years I fished two Missouri trout streams. Actually they are named rivers but they don’t compare to rivers like the Mississippi or Missouri. They are small. You can cast across them. Somehow I felt it was easier to fish in a clear trout stream that you could see the fish in. Why do fish byte. You could see the fish and cast right to them. Not a byte. But sometimes after an hour of not having any bytes I could catch two or three fish in five minutes. Next they are turned off again.

One time I was silver salmon fishing in early August at the mouth of Clear Creek that feeds the Talkeetna River in Alaska once. The Talkeetna River is a glacier melt river and is dirty brown in August and raging with logs floating down stream. We hired an outfitter to run us up river in a boat from the town of Talkeetna to the mouth of Clear Creek. It was a warm summer day for Alaska and a good day for fishing. We got into silver salmon like most people only dream about. Every other cast was a salmon.

They Moved Our Fish!

Dale and I found a sweet hole in the small 96 acre Harmony Mission Lake. It was in an old fence row. We had gone back time after time, year after year and pulled in bass, nice bass, out of the hole every time. It was a winner. We told no one the exact location. If another fisherman came back while we were over the hole and inquired about our luck, we told them, “No luck.” It was our secret and we were going to keep it that way.

I had a twelve foot john boat that was outfitted with two fishing seats with backs, a five horse Sears motor, and a little trolling motor. We would slip in-between the trees, drop minnow bated lines with slip boppers to get down about ten feet. That’s where the fish were. Not five feet, not fifteen feet, ten feet. One day we took a larger boat with a fish finder back to our hole to find out what the bottom looked like. At ten feet, the lake bottom broke sharply down into a 5 foot deep ditch that was between trees left standing in the flooded fence row. We were catching the fish right at the top edge of the ditch. The fish finder verified we really had a sweet hole.

One spring we returned to our sweet hole. It was late March. The weather was just barely warm enough to get out on the water. Our first fishing trip of the year. We went directly to our sweet hole, dropped our minnows to ten feet, put our feet up, poured coffee from our thermos, and relaxed. One hour passed and no bass. Two hours passed and no bass. Three hours passed and no bass. We got skunked. This was the first time our sweet hole had let us down.

We returned to our sweet hole about every two to three weeks that year. No luck. We were getting desperate and fishing other locations on the lake. Once in a while we caught one or two fish between us. We were devastated. One July evening we were pulling the boat out of the water and started a conversation with a local farmer who was cat fishing from the bank by the boat ramp. We told him that for years we could catch fish here, had a sweet hole, and this year nothing. This was the first time we revealed our sweet hole to anyone else. We were desperate for answers! The farmer looked at us kind of funny and said, “Didn’t you guys know the conversation department took fish out of here over the winter.” The conversation department had removed fish from Harmony Mission lake and stocked others. That was about ten years ago. Now once in a while we return to Harmony Mission lake, but with little success. They moved our fish!