By now, most of our friends and readers down along the southern shores of Lake Michigan are pretty much sick of winter.

What started out as an average winter took a quick U-turn in midwinter and blasted us with a series of arctic cold snaps and snow. After all the mild winters in recent years, I guess we just got spoiled.

With March, we will see the beginning of spring, with the days getting longer, and hopefully the temperatures getting warmer. It’s a time of nature’s reawakening, and hopefully a chance to get out on the lake and capitalize on some hungry fish. 

The frigid, arctic cold, as of this writing, has made fishing on the Wisconsin waters of the “Big Pond” pretty much an “only the strong survive” situation. The fish have been biting for bundled-up, hearty anglers, but I can’t take the cold like I used to.

Brown trout have been hitting on spawn sacs, shiners, gobies, and frozen herring through the ice in the harbors in Milwaukee and Kenosha. Some lake trout and whitefish have been taken from deeper areas in the harbor.

The mouth of the Root River in Racine has been giving up some trout and northern pike. 

In Illinois, not too many people have been getting out because of the weather. There has been some trout action in Chicago’s harbors for brown trout and steelhead through the ice, but getting out on the ice can be risky. Always fish with a buddy and tie yourself off to a dock in the harbor.

Perch have been hitting in the slips at 87th Street on the far southeast side, but it’s been day-to-day. Some days have produced limits of nice-sized perch, but on other days, the only action you get will be dinks.

I’ve heard that on some days, they have been kicking perch fishermen out, but I haven’t been getting any answers as to why.

I’ve mentioned in past articles about anglers littering. That’s something that will get areas closed to fishing practically anywhere. I will keep on trying to find out the reason. Years ago, you never saw people leave places where they were allowed to fish littered with garbage, but I guess this is a new world.

One of the hottest perch spots that I’ve ever seen was back in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s at the old General Mills slips near 104th St. off the Calumet River. They used to make Cheerios, Wheaties and other breakfast cereals there.

They would park barges in the slip where the grain was unloaded for the silos. Not too many people knew about this spot, but it would produce buckets of perch whenever you fished it. There were no possession limits on perch back then.

On most days, you didn’t even need minnows or bait. Anglers used a simple rig with two pink jigs tied to the main line dressed with Twister Tails (white) and your weight on the bottom. You could fish between the barges. Dropping your offering straight down you would let it hit the bottom, closing the bail on your reel, and immediately setting the hook, you would almost always bring up a double-header of nice-sized perch. It was that fast and easy. You could fill up a bucket in practically no time. This hot-and-heavy action lasted throughout the winter. Most of the fishing was done on weekends when the plant would be down.

As the saying goes, “Good things can’t last forever.” It was just a matter of time before the word got out and the area was overwhelmed with fishermen—both good, honest, law-abiding anglers, as well as a few slobs.

The area was posted “No Trespassing,” but the staff of General Mills seemingly looked the other way, and the “red-hot” fishing continued with fine eating perch running 9 to 11 inches filling the bucket. These perfect-sized perch almost looked like they were stamped out of a mold.

You could literally catch all the perch you wanted and fill up buckets. This was before a limit was put on perch and it would probably have taken about five minutes to catch today’s limit of 15 fish. In all my years of fishing, I’ve never seen anything like it. A virtual perch gold mine.

In came the slobs. It was just a matter of time before they started leaving the place looking like a dump with their garbage, empty bait containers, beer and pop bottles, and broken glass everywhere. When I would drive by on Mondays, a cleanup crew would work most of the day, cleaning up the mess left behind by these idiots.

I knew our fishing days there were numbered. Nothing seemed to bother these jerks. In addition to loading the place up with their garbage, they would bust up wooden pallets and build huge bonfires. Finally, things came to a head when one of these morons started up one of the company’s front end loaders and took it for a joyride. The piece of machinery wound up being driven into the drink. The next day, the area was permanently shut down. More No Trespassing signs were put up, and eventually the entire area was fenced in.

Just another case of a few morons ruining it for everyone. We are running out of places to fish from shore, and eventually there will be no place to fish period. A word to the wise: Take your garbage home with you!

Well, that’s about it for now. I must let my blood pressure settle down. March is probably one of the best fishing months of the year on the “Big Lake.” Get out and enjoy it.