My fishing rod sat gathering dust for several years until this past June when free fishing weekend came around again. During my stay on dry land, I met and married a wonderful woman from England. She has adapted quite well to life in the Inland Northwest in the past 2 years, even though it its vastly different from the flatlands of NE England.. She loves it here, with the exception of the summer heat (102 here today) and mosquitos. Stores here do sell a lot of sunscreen and bug repellent. lol
This year she wanted to give fishing a try, having never done it before. So on June 9th we headed to one of my favorite old haunts, Eloika Lake. A thunder storm drove us off the lake in the early afternoon, but not before we hooked 8 fish. And that wasn't all that got hooked that day. My wife is now a fishing nut! She boated her 100th fish a week ago. I have never seen someone take to fishing like she has. And I have never had so much fun watching someone out fish me 2 to 1. I think she cheats but I haven't figured out how yet.
We have fished Eloika 11 times now in the past 6 weeks. Fishing has been from good to excellent every time. Our worst day we caught 7 and our best was 24. We started out fishing the south end from the public launch and have moved north with the weed growth. We fish the open pockets of water near the surface weeds. We also did the same thing at the north end on 3 occasions. Our catch was about a 60/40 split of 8-10 inch bass and perch the first few trips out. It shifted to less bass, more perch and a few crappies by mid June, and by the end of June the crappies had taken over! We fished the evenings on June 28th and 30th with 24 fish each evening. We caught 38 crappies on those 2 evenings and only about 1 fish in 10 was under 9 inches. Our biggest was 13 1/2 and over 2 lbs.
We returned again on July 10th and 11th and fished from about 7:30 pm till dark. It was just too darn hot to go out earlier. Caught 16 fish one evening and 17 the next. All but 6 were crappies and only 2 crappie under 9 inches. We have caught all our fish on 1/8 oz mini jigs tipped with a worm or 1/2 a night crawler. We fish these below a buoy style pencil bobber with about 3-5 feet of line below, trying to stay just about the lower level weeds. Had good luck with black/yellow, yellow and black/green skirts. But the best color is the brown/orange ones we found at the local Big R store. Those are knocking them dead right now! We keep a few to eat now and then, but 90% of the fish we catch are released. Also had a rainbow trout, a bullhead catfish, a pumpkin seed, and a tench visit our boat. Eloika always was, and still is my favorite lake. We are hoping to be back again on Saturday. Oh and NO water skiers or jet skis there either!
We are glad we found this website and hope we can contribute some worth while info.

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