This report is for last Saturday.

The road was terrible, the ice fog thick, and it was 16 deg. at Ft Spokane launch. We were morons.

Headed to the main river to hit a couple of humps that have been producing. The main river water temp was 35 deg. We ran into some ice across the river near split rock; luckily it was not thick and we were able to keep motoring upriver. Worked a series of rock humps and could only find one that was holding fish willing to bite. My guess is the water temp has really slowed down the bite and the weather this week is not going to help that situation. Dragging jigs slowly over the rock piles produced fish but most of the bites were just weight and we easily missed two times more fish then we caught which was seven out on the main river. I lost a 19" eye at the boat, too lazy to grab the net and another one, felt much larger halfway back to the boat. Never got a good enough hook set into it because I only felt some weight. By noon we decided to head up the Arm.

The water temp heading up the Arm is two degrees warmer than the main river; this should encourage the walleyes to start their trip up the Arm in the near future. We stopped at the first island and jigged down river with the current; no bites. Headed up to McCoy's and pulled jigs down the flat near the buoy; no bites here either. Last stop was the big flat at Lapham's; pulled jigs around and located a few fish in 30-35 FOW. Caught eight more eyes; only one was big enough to keep the others were just dinks. My buddy Jay had the hot hand and he also lost a quality fish, probably 5-6 lbs. based on the bend in his rod. One good head shake and the fish was gone.

Going to take a pass on this weekend based on the temps forecasted to be in the single digits; last weekend we didn't stop chipping ice out of our eyelets until about 1400.