Ice Fishing Rigs – Big Bluegills

Ice Fishing Rigs – Big Bluegills By Nick Simonson For the past few weekends, I have been exploring a small impoundment about twenty minutes from home.  Rumor had it that big bluegills roamed the basin out from the public access, but all my efforts had produced over the past month was a plethora of puny [...]

Pheasant Feathers for Fly Fishing

By Nick Simonson This year, it seemed that every pheasant was a trophy.  Whether it was those early birds on opening weekend with half-colored feathers, or that lone rooster coming late in the season, each one provided a welcome warm meal and a new crop of pheasant feathers for fly fishing.  With one season behind [...]

Ice Fishing Tip Ups

By Nick Simonson I often think back fondly to my times while ice fishing tip ups growing up in North Dakota.  For those anglers who love to chase a waiving flag across the ice, there’s no better place than the Peace Garden State, where on hardwater, fishermen are allotted four lines with no restrictions as to [...]

Winter Current Walleye Fishing

By Nick Simonson My prediction from last month – that winter would eventually get colder – was way off; so much for making the safe bet. The ice in most areas hasn’t grown much, and with unprecedented January temperatures crossing the 50- and 60-degree barriers across the upper Midwest in recent days, it has receded [...]

Ice Fishing Shelters – Ice Anchors

By Nick Simonson The noise in the pines behind me grew until it sounded like a rushing spring waterfall on the North Shore.  I had been on the ice just long enough to set up my hub-style ice fishing shelter, drop my Vexilar transducer and land my first fish of the new year when the [...]

Winter Weather Predictions

By Nick Simonson “Guys, where are we,” this initial inquiry by Dominic Monaghan’s character, Charlie, summed up the question that I and ten million other viewers tried to figure out for six seasons on the TV show Lost. The J. J. Abrams sci-fi series focused on a group of plane crash survivors marooned on a [...]

Ice Fishing Tips – Early Ice

By Nick Simonson While taking those first nervous steps onto the ice this weekend, I stared down into the weedy shallows with their vegetation frozen in place, the last respiration of openwater photosynthesis trapped in the tiny bubbles just inches from the surface of the frozen water. I traced my way along a small crack [...]

Tebowing – Late Season Pheasant Hunting

By Nick Simonson It’s December, it’s cold, it’s tough going in the field. But somehow, as the season wears on, I find myself out there, still grinding away, searching for a last chance bird or deer with a never-give-up attitude I hoped I’d have at this time of year, way back in October as I [...]

Bow Hunting with Trail Cameras

By Nick Simonson I feel like Sauron from the Lord of the Rings trilogy; with my all-seeing eye looking out over the land – well at least 100 square feet of it. With my new trail camera set up overlooking the entrance to a watering area about 50 yards from my favorite bow hunting stand, [...]

Deer Hunting Tips

By Nick Simonson “Wait…what…how did she, where did she come from?!?  Aw crap…no wait, maybe she doesn’t see me, she’s looking…does she? “WHHHHHT!  WHHHHT!” “Guhhh…” My heart never sinks so low as when I know the jig is up; when all the scent killer in the world isn’t enough to cover up a stupid mistake [...]

Deer Hunting in Windy Conditions

By Nick Simonson Rarely does a strong wind factor into a good day outdoors.  Sure, there are those times where the right wind whips across a reef or a point, roiling the waters and bringing schools of walleyes in to feed on discombobulated baitfish.  And maybe a breeze catches  a rooster’s scent and wafts it [...]

Retrieving Upland Game

By Nick Simonson While finishing up a walk for ruffed grouse along the Saint Louis River in northeastern Minnesota this weekend, I decided to skirt the edge of a stand of young aspen trees which came right up to a stretch of sixty-year-old red pines. I weaved in and out of the last row of [...]

Ruffed Grouse Opener

Our Outdoors By Nick Simonson Opening day in the northwoods of Minnesota generally isn’t the ideal time to chase after the booming wingbeats of a ruffed grouse.  The weather is hit-or-miss, with some mid-September weekend temperatures climbing into the 80s, limiting the time afield for my lab, Gunnar.  There’s still a great deal of foliage [...]

Projects with Antlers

Our Outdoors: DIY Rattling Antlers – Projects with Antlers By Nick Simonson Do you hear that tick-tick-ticking? It’s either the second hand of the hall clock marking off the moments until I’m up in the stand on bow opener or it’s the beginning of field combat between this year’s herd of whitetail bucks in an [...]

Trolling Crankbaits

Our Outdoors By Nick Simonson In cooler waters of May and June the shallows can seem almost bare.  Nothing but the occasional waterboatman or roaming bluegill disturbs the water bordering shore.  Then as summer peaks, it seems the shallows are suddenly alive and teeming with small fish, as if the table was set for a [...]

Minnesota Youth Hunting

Our Outdoors - By Nick Simonson Odds are your introduction to hunting wasn’t like mine.  Sure, I collected the tail feathers and wings from the pheasants and ducks my dad brought home from his hunts when I was too young to go into the field with him.  But with the death of the family dog on [...]

Right Under My Nose

By Nick Simonson When you stand the world on its head, or do your best to stand on yours, the perspective of how and what things are gets turned upside down and undoubtedly provides a new view of what were once familiar surroundings.  Last week, as I made the move from the house my wife [...]

How to Make Muskie Spinnerbaits

Our Outdoors – by Nick Simonson Late last summer while scrounging for replacement lure-making parts, I came across a badly worn muskie spinnerbait which had been reduced to a bare lure head, trailer hook and just one of two blades. Recalling some spare black and red flashabou tucked into my desk drawer back home, I [...]

Northern Pike Slime

Our Outdoors: Slime Time By Nick Simonson While unhooking my second pike of the morning, the two-pound fish slipped quickly out of my wet hand and back into the water with a splash. All that was left as evidence that I had even caught it was a chewed up plastic tail and a small coating [...]

Walleye Master

Our Outdoors – by Nick Simonson I heard the audible click of a bail opening at the front of the boat and the whisper of line being played out and I chuckled. I turned and watched the same scene that I had observed multiple times last Sunday night. There in the spotlight was the star [...]

Mahi Mahi Fishing

By Nick Simonson It finally sank in when I was about an hour from the lake cabin where my buddy had been watching my dog while I was on vacation. As I looked around the midway point gas station at the beige grasses, gray skies, and leafless trees, I could hardly believe that just sixteen [...]

Super Sport License

Our Outdoors By Nick Simonson Many times I think back fondly to reading class in sixth grade at Jefferson Elementary School. My teacher, Mr. Horner, read us a number of exciting books, many with a coming-of-age story behind them, preparing us for our adventure into Junior High the following year. Among the titles was the [...]

Smallmouth Bass Jigs

Our Outdoors: Smallmouth Bass Jigs By Nick Simonson Learning how to fish on the Sheyenne River in southeastern North Dakota during my late teens and early twenties allowed me the luxury to go after smallmouth bass from the first warm-up in early April until the fish really got going in May. Throughout the years, my [...]

Sharing Fishing Success

Our Outdoors  - By Nick Simonson I had promised to take a coworker, Dane, on a number of fishing trips this past year, but it seemed as if fate was aligned against the idea of getting him exposed to the different niches of angling he wanted to learn about. Our muskie adventure in August was cancelled [...]

Downstream Mentality

Our Outdoors: Downstream Mentality By Nick Simonson Each spring, the banks of area lakes and rivers are littered with pop bottles, chip bags, Styrofoam cups, plastic containers, beer cans, and my personal pet peeve, spent fishing line. The snow that lines the gutters of city streets and highway ditches slowly gives way to reveal plastic, [...]

The Ugly Fish

Our Outdoors – By Nick Simonson I’ll admit it. I enjoy The Soup on E! Network. Joel McHale watches all the crap TV shows, makes fun of each in a thirty-second clip and moves on so I get all the best, worst and weirdest parts of what happened from what I’d never watch on TV [...]

180 Ice Holes

Our Outdoors: 180 Ice Holes By Nick Simonson 180 ice holes make an area about the size of a football field look like a giant slice of Swiss cheese. 180 ice holes feel like a P90X doubles workout day followed by a lactic acid soak for the shoulders, back and triceps, even with a lightweight [...]

Fishing Memories

Our Outdoors By Nick Simonson Paging through the pile of tackle catalogs that all seemed to arrive in my mailbox on the same day (a sure sign that spring is still coming) made me amazed, once again, at the number of lure colors available.  From plastics, to crankbaits, and even standard jigs, there are literally thousands [...]

Some Things Don’t Change

By Nick Simonson I lifted my right foot as the slight humming noise approached from behind me. A few moments later, I lifted my left foot and hopped a step over to keep my balance. The whir, beep and buzz of the floor-cleaning robot my wife received as a Christmas present continued on as I [...]

Vertical Ice Fishing

By Nick Simonson There’s an old Irish proverb that wishes good luck to the traveler by stating “may the road rise to meet you.” For anglers, especially those on the ice, it should be more like “may the fish rise to meet you.” Presentation is one of the key factors for consistently catching fish and [...]

Lure Making Tips

By Nick Simonson In the past few weeks, I’ve touched upon different jig patterns and fly patterns on tap for the new year in my articles and that, along with what looks to be a winter that will cause a cabin fever epidemic of historic proportions, has elicited some emails and Facebook messages asking me [...]

Downsize Your Ice Fishing

By Nick Simonson As the seasons pass and I have become more adept at ice fishing and technology has bolstered my ability on the ice, I have drifted away from those species I once pursued primarily in winter. Walleyes and northern pike, though tops on the food chain, take a back seat these days to [...]

Late Season Compromise

By Nick Simonson When temperatures drop below freezing, my thoughts generally turn to ice fishing. My wife’s thoughts on the other hand, turn to ways to keep me from testing the newly-formed surface of local waters. And as we usually do in our marriage, we have reached a nice compromise on this issue. In the [...]

Ghost in the Grove

By Nick Simonson As sundown approached one evening, I heard a loud series of crashes in the ten acres of old elms behind me. The repeated footsteps thrashing the leaves and twigs were far more aggressive than those of the doe and fawn that had crept out of the trees a half hour earlier to [...]

The Extremes

Our Outdoors: To The Extreme By Nick Simonson I know it’s going to get colder. But I’m ready for it. At least I think I am. While manning my post on an extended family member’s farm atop a four-legged stand tucked into the woods along an open grass pasture bordered by a meandering creek, I [...]

First Test of Buck Fever

By Nick Simonson As a beginning bow hunter, I fall victim to what I’m sure are rookie mistakes. The sound of a squirrel on the ground, rustling through leaves for a bite of food is about all it takes to get my heart pumping and I find myself overamped at the noise. However, I am [...]

CRP – Make the Call

By Nick Simonson Last winter was one of the harshest I can recall since my senior year of high school. That winter of 1996-97 kicked off with a cold and snowy November and weekly storm events occurred straight on through the “Flizzard” in April, which flooded both Fargo and Grand Forks, N.D., ending the most [...]

Fishing Grand Slam

By Nick Simonson While growing up on the Sheyenne River, I’d make it a weekend effort to complete what I called the Sheyenne Slam. It wasn’t necessarily tough to do, despite the parameters of seven species in two days, considering that most of them were willing biters and after a few weeks on the water, [...]

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 events, [...]

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 [...]

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 web, one thing [...]

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 [...]

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 that [...]

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 was [...]

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 with [...]

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 water and [...]

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 [...]

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 with [...]

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 and [...]

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 up with [...]

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 fishing a [...]

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 wasn’t [...]

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, with [...]

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 [...]

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. We [...]

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 road [...]

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 [...]

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. His [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 the [...]

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 [...]

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 from [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]