Badger delivers again! We fished from 8am-1pm and limited out on rainbows. We must have hooked 25-30 fish, but between losing them at the boat, releasing small ones or them spitting the hook (several while over or in the net!), we came home with two really nice ones at 12" & 13", a pair @ 11" and a few around 9-10" we had to keep for various reasons (deeply hooked, eye puncture, etc.).

Speaking of doing the right thing with the ones you'd rather not keep, I was absolutely disgusted to watch 2 other boats mishandle fish. We saw two guys in an older o/b blue boat watch their bobbers about 50' from a fish flopping on the surface that I suspect they'd released earlier. If he picked up that fish with a towel to unhook it like I saw him do his other fish, then even if he did everything else right and that guy swam away he's as good as dead with that much harm done to his protective slime.

In another instance, I witnessed one guy in an o/b rowboat huck a fish 10 feet into the air when releasing it. If I'd had a cell phone signal I'd have reported him right then & there. I was stunned.

Listen people, if you want to fish in the future, you gotta play nice. Mistreat our native species and get used to the thought of tighter regulations, catching inferior hatchery fish and paying more expensive licensing fees for programs to breed those replacement stocks. You think I wouldn't have rather stayed to try for more 13" fish instead of filling a stringer half-full with small ones?

Know how to handle fish, know the regs. Wet your hands before you handle fish. Or better yet, use needle-nose pliers or surgical clamps to unhook your fish while they hang on the hooks, so you don't even have to touch them. If they swallow the hook deep and/or you take a really long time unhooking, that baby's yours. There are gentlemen's rules and there are state rules. I may give you a dirty look for breaking a gentleman's rule but I'll rat you out in a hearbeat the next time I see such blatant offenses. You know who you are.

If there was a silver lining in all of what I saw, maybe it's that that osprey family had some easy pickings from all the floaters we saw (4-5 at least). We did get to watch one dive-bomb a fish complete with splashdown, 2-3 seconds in the water and takeoff. Very impressive!

OK, off my soapbox and back to fishing... We talked to guys using powerbait and saw many stationary boats watching bobbers, but we hooked every single fish on spinners. And yellow was the magic color. We anchored about 20' off shore and in 30' of water and worked the cliffline and even out toward the open water. We'd toss it, let it sink to a count of 5-10 depending on which way we were casting, and then work a twitchy, variable-speed retrieve.

Badger is awesome, just wish it had a dock of some sort to make loading and boarding/unboarding easier. Great overall launch facilities though with lots of parking, toilets and two decent concrete ramps.

Good luck folks, we only have one more weekend to fish most of these lakes!

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