Floating Foster Arend

With only a short work day ahead of me, and still shivering from the excitement of Sault Ste Marie, I was looking for a quick, easy way to hook into some fast fishing action. Luckily for me, there's a stocked pond that the county and MN DNR fill with rainbow trout on my way home from work. It's a reclaimed quarry so the banks are heavily vegetated and not suitable for wade fishing but it's great fun from a float tube. So, before work I loaded the car with my stuff and headed in for the "joys" of work but had a little to look forward to for when it was all done.

I can't say Foster Arend pond is a wilderness experience as the sounds of Rochester are very evident, there's a heavily used swimming beach, a fishing pier and it's usually ringed with night-crawler laden bobber fishermen, but its banks are wooded and there's beaver, ducks and geese to keep one company. The fishery is usually boom or bust, depending how long it's been since it was stocked, but there's usually a trout or two and always all the sunnies one can bring themselves to waste time with. My technique is not fancy as I troll a woolly bugger behind me as I wind around the lake. Small nymphs are monopolized by the sunnies so you need something a little larger (although you still get a few sunnies) but you can switch flies on the rare occasion you sight a pod of resting trout, or there's a specific hatch.

It wasn't long before I had my first rainbow to and that was the start of steady action for the next couple of hours. When I was done I had ten rainbow trout and six sunnies. The highlight was when I stummbled upon a pod of perhaps a hundred freshly released trout finning in a small bay. They would slam the small pass lake wet as soon as it hit the surface but after only a couple of fish the pod disappeared. Perhaps the dark shadow of a large bass I saw had something to do with that (and no, I couldn't get him to hit my woolly bugger). The rainbows were all the same, small size but it was better than nothing and I can always convince myself it's a great way to get some fitness in.