August Muskies

By Nick Simonson
I stood at the edge of the dock and sighed as Sunday’s gusty south wind whipped through the pages in my mental calendar. Next weekend is Labor Day with family up north; the next, dove hunting; the one after that, grouse opener, and then bow hunting. Every weekend was filled with [...]

Treestand Safety

By Nick Simonson
While in the throes of a hotly contested battle with the seat section of a new 15-foot ladder stand, I took a break from what is now becoming a late summer ritual to get a drink of water and my bearings while looking over the assembly manual. It wasn’t the antler fever-inducing [...]

Hunting Doves

By Nick Simonson
I’ll take the sure thing before I’ll take the risk. Give me a savings account with two percent over anything on Wall Street these days. I play poker like that too, which might be why I’m not very good at it, and I rarely bet on sports, even when I know the Gators [...]

Following Smallies

By Nick Simonson
It’s a jungle out there. Every man for himself. Greed is good. These mantras aptly describe the competitive drive in the world around us; natural laws that even mankind hasn’t rid from our collective psyche after millennia of becoming civilized. Whether it is in big business or the food [...]

Fishing Northern Pike

Our Outdoors: A Pike in the Hand
By Nick Simonson
Not once but twice, the devil’s fork tail turned short just feet in front of the dock at the family cabin. The fish, a muskie of nearly four feet in length had given chase, even bumping the lure halfway through my first retrieve, and exerted a [...]

Tying Foam Flies

In my memory banks, I hold a combined blur of countless lazy, sunny afternoons standing in the shallows of the lake, long after more serious quarries have been abandoned in favor of hearing the plop of a fat foam fly and the delayed smack of a never-satiated bluegill rising to pull it from the surface. [...]

Topwater Bass Fishing

Top Water Fishing Lures
By Nick Simonson
I still remember the first time I watched a surface lure get inhaled and taken into the depths by a largemouth bass. It was a calm, sunny Saturday morning in late May and my buddy flung his Zara Spook about twenty yards off shore over a shallow flat. [...]

Soft Plastics for Bass

By Nick Simonson
Fishing fast is a fun way of covering water and targeting active largemouth bass. Ripping crankbaits and burning spinnerbaits back to the boat triggers reaction strikes and puts a solid bend in the rod when largemouth are in a feeding mood. This fun-n-gun presentation also helps anglers key in on areas [...]

Homemade Gypsy Jig

By Nick Simonson
When I was just getting the hang of what worked and what didn’t on the water, I stumbled on what was, at the time to me, a miracle lure. It was a banana head jig with a fan-shaped skirt made from krystal flash called the Gypsi Jig. For that summer, it [...]

Fishing North Shore Steelhead

By Nick Simonson
If you’ve ever laid eyes on a steelhead, you know the color they bring to a spring fishing trip. The hens are a glistening chrome with a faded pink stripe down their sides and a light green top. The bucks turn a deep pink – almost purple – throughout their sides [...]

Stocked Trout Fly

Stocked trout are known as the eat-anything additions to their foster flows, and they probably aren’t as sharp as their more naturally occurring cousins. However, they can still be a challenge and are definitely a lot of fun as the angling season gets going. While many trout anglers prefer using spinners to cover [...]

Brown Trout Fishing

It’s What We Make of It
By Nick Simonson
A year ago this very morning I was sitting across from my old boss in a conference room as he explained the layoff benefits the company would be providing me until they’d run out or until economic conditions improved. As I had been the one handling the [...]

Horizontal Jigging

By Nick Simonson
Have you ever watched the way minnows move? When I was in Grand Forks, N.D. attending “The School that Shall Not Be Named” I had multiple chances to jump the Red River into East Grand Forks, Minn., and watch as trout, bass and pike preyed upon minnows that the staff had dumped [...]

Ultralight Fishing Tackle

The UltraLight Brigade
By Nick Simonson
There’s something special about taming a charging bull bluegill on line as thin as a spider web. Few fishing sensations are wilder than a white bass tearing up the sunset reflecting off of the evening water. Even a ten-inch trout brings a wondrous battle as it twists and turns [...]

Fishing Diary

By Nick Simonson
There have been a lot of changes in my life over the past five years. I’ve lived in two states and three towns and have had six different jobs, with this one being the most consistent. In that time I’ve fished over 60 lakes and rivers, gaining some level of familiarity [...]

Time to Get Moving

By Nick Simonson
It was hard to hear the beep of the cash register as I stood in line with the few items that my wife requested I pick up from the grocery store. Behind me, a four-year old girl screamed bloody murder each time her mother pried the candy bar from her hands and [...]

Fishing Buddies

By Nick Simonson
Of angling’s many positive elements, near the top of the list is that it is a great way to spend time with friends that are so close they might as well be family. My buddies and I try to make it a regular thing to meet up at the cabin, at someone’s [...]

Homemade Musky Baits

By Nick Simonson
Muskie anglers love to throw the biggest, flashiest baits. But in these days of dwindling discretionary income, spinners with oversized blades, magnum flashabou skirts and price tags to match are becoming cost-prohibitive. However, you can produce a bait at home for half as much as you’d pay for popular store models [...]

Sculpins

For the Presidents’ Day weekend, I had planned out a solid day of fishing on a lake near my mother-in-law’s house where I knew the fish would bite all day. A couple hours at sunrise put me on some good-sized, fast-biting bluegills with the occasional crappie mixed in. The agenda was to meet [...]

Fish House Spotters

By Nick Simonson
Shantytowns are generally a bad sign. Economic downturns, natural disasters and tribal wars all come to mind when such a place is shown on the evening news. However, in the ice belt and points north, it is the sign of something good – a hot bite on frozen waters. While [...]

The Glo Bug Fly

By Nick Simonson
Last week, as I braced myself against the wind and made my way up the walk in the glow of the front porch light, I saw through the blowing snow that first sign of spring. It wasn’t a robin, hiding its head under its wing in the late January cold. It [...]

Life List Lunkers

By Nick Simonson
There are hundreds of days booked in my fishing logs and countless others banked in my memories. From watching a field of tip-up flags pop for northern pike on a chilly winter morning to a steamy July evening spent fishing an inexhaustible school of white bass, it is tough to keep track [...]

Wetlands Key to Spring Flood

By Nick Simonson
Reports this month have many people across the region looking out their front windows with worry. In the wake of back-to-back blizzards, the National Weather Service (NWS) released its early-season forecast for this spring’s flood potential for the upper Midwest. Some form of flooding is expected when the snow pack melts, [...]

Make Custom Crappie Jigs

Our Outdoors – By Nick Simonson
As winter blankets, and blankets, and blankets the region with snow, it is becoming more apparent that it will be a long season indeed. That’s not a bad thing if you need some time to get your tacklebox ready for one of open water’s early quarries – prespawn slab [...]

Trickle Down Techonomics

Our Outdoors – By Nick Simonson
A post on the ice fishing forum of a website that I help moderate asked: “I paid $300 for an old sled shack and a Vexilar, did I get a good deal?”
My response was as it usually is for these kinds of questions, “You’ll wonder how you ever fished without [...]

Fly Tying for the WinterTime

Our Outdoors – By Nick Simonson
From Bismarck to Brainerd to Balaton, the region has been blasted with the most epic blizzard since those doubled-barreled every-other-weekend storms from the winter of 1996-97. My wife and I crawled along I-94 to visit my family just before the Gulf-fueled, moisture-laden monster dumped 16 inches of snow. [...]

Hottest Ice Fishing Gear of 2010

By Nick Simonson
The ice on most northern lakes is now thick enough for anglers to safely haul out their toys thanks to a cold stretch at the beginning of the month. Though nighttime temperatures have been below zero, new innovations and advancements in tackle, gear and shelters are helping anglers heat up the early-ice [...]

Cold Weather Pheasants

By Nick Simonson
It’s a cold day with clear blue skies following the winter’s first blizzard, which left six inches of snow as an early Christmas present. A group of buntings flits from the shoulder to the field edge as I turn my hard-starting pickup off of the highway. We rumble down the gravel [...]

Small Ice Fishing Jigs

By Nick Simonson
It’s the evening of the first day when the temperature has stayed well below freezing and I’m sitting in the not-quite-bright-enough light of the living room, squinting as hard as I can in an effort to thread a wisp of one-pound test through the eye of a 1/64 ounce Genz worm in preparation [...]

The Fifty Pointer

As I joined the mad rush at 5 a.m. on Black Friday with my wife in the aisles of the Virginia, Minn. Target store, I caught the stare of one half-awake fellow in a camouflage hunting coat, pinned down between a cart full of pink baby clothes and a display of 42-inch plasma TVs. [...]

I’m Thankful For the Outdoors

Our Outdoors: I’m Thankful
By Nick Simonson
I’m thankful for Gunnar,
And his powerful nose.
As he sniffs out the pheasants,
From harvested rows.
I’m thankful for trap shoots,
In June and July.
That cut down on fall misses,
So I don’t wonder why.
I’m thankful for crappies,
Dressed in black and green.
And bluegill and white bass,
And yellow perch in between.
I’m thankful for harvests,
That turn [...]

The Bye Week

By Nick Simonson
My guess is whomever was in charge of setting up the 2009 NFL schedule was a deer hunter and a Minnesota Vikings fan. What other alignment of the stars could explain last week’s bye for the Favre n’ Harvin show falling precisely on the opening weekend of deer firearms season in the [...]

Spring Steelhead Fishing

By Nick Simonson
As my offering drifted around in the pool eddy, I hoped that my brother would see a fish caught – if not by me, then by another angler, or maybe himself – and he would experience the finned allure of the north shore of Lake Superior beyond the lichen-covered bluffs and pine-shaded streams [...]

Taxidermy Tips

By Nick Simonson
At a near run, you step over the crest of the small hill to the other side that leads down to the oak bottom and wonder where the deer bounded after it left your sight. With the scent of gunpowder fading, you follow the sign in the brown leaves and dry grass [...]

Not the Same Old Safety

By Nick Simonson
Year after year, the approach of the deer firearms opener causes something to stir in the souls of outdoorsmen. Tags are placed in secure spot, the final preparation of shooting lanes occurs in the woods and walking hunters map out their favorite draws, ravines and creekbottoms for opening day. With all [...]

Lightning Bugs – Pheasant Tail Nymphs

Our Outdoors
Nick Simonson
Of all the game birds sportsmen pursue, none is more colorful than the ringneck pheasant. Which makes it a pretty odd fact that the most popular fly used by outdoorsmen is the generally drab looking pheasant tail nymph – or simply, the PTN. Of course, trout, bluegill and other fish don’t seem [...]

Double Down on Pheasants

By Nick Simonson
This year’s pheasant opener was unique in a number of ways. It was the first time I had opened the season somewhere other than North Dakota, with kickoff usually held at my grandmother’s farm near Watford City, N.D. in the company of my dad, brother, uncle and cousins. The hunting report [...]

It’s About the Little Things

Our Outdoors
Nick Simonson

 
It’s the little things in life that matter; a couple bluegills on the flyrod to pass a sunny afternoon at the lake or a few golden walleye fillets sizzling in the frying pan for an evening meal. And it is these little things that make angling so much fun. Getting to that point [...]

Spring River Walleye Fishing

Our Outdoors
Nick Simonson
Spring in the upper Midwest is unpredictable; seventy-two and sunny one weekend, twenty-seven and snowing the next. However, there is one thing about spring that is a given; fish will go through the same process in preparation to beget more fish. It is during this time of year – the prespawn period – [...]

Fishing in May

Our Outdoors
Nick Simonson
“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” This line, an eye-to-eye plea by Matthew Broderick as the title character in the 1986 film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, sums up our very existence.
For anglers, month of May moves even faster. Between graduations, [...]

Walleye Fever – Trophy Walleye Fishing

Our Outdoors
Nick Simonson

 
Call it the result of a lucky catch, call it an unwanted side effect of Minnesota fishing opener (I guess now I see why ND really got rid of opening dates for fishing) but I’ve been stricken with walleye fever.
Chance Encounter
The symptoms started last Tuesday when fishing with a couple of buddies on [...]

Flinch-Free Firing – Rifle Shooting Technique

Our Outdoors
Nick Simonson
An old neighbor of mine who was just as good at busting sporting clays on the skeet range as he was at busting my chops regarding my tales of fishing and hunting misadventure, asked me what my problem was when he read I didn’t get a deer on opening weekend a few years [...]