It was a pleasant night to fish – a slight breeze was at our backs, the water was calm and easy to wade through, and the temperature was comfortable for a night of fishing. Beside all this, we had already caught a couple of walleye an hour or so into the night. Considering the conditions, I did not want to move from our location until we were forced to do so.
I knew the wind was forecasted to slowly shift a whole 180 degrees until it was directly in our face, but that was supposed to be hours out. I hoped that the forecast was a little off, and that it would change closer to the end of our night of fishing. With the success we were having in our current spot, no one wanted to migrate to a new fishing location.
Perhaps my biggest downfall was “figuring out” what the future was supposed to hold before it even revealed it. I mean, it was such a great night to be fishing, and we were already catching ‘eyes. Who would want to move when we were accomplishing exactly what we set out to do? As far as I was concerned, nothing was going to move us, unless it was drastic and left us with no other choice.
As if in answer, a cold gust of wind out of nowhere slammed us in the face. My daydreaming mind snapped back to reality, shocked at the sudden change of the wind. In a literal second, the wind direction had shifted 180 degrees, as if the forecasted wind had suddenly prevailed and blown over the lake.
My doubting mind still had the best of me – “Surely,” I thought, “that wind was just a fluke gust. It’ll calm down in a second.” One cast turned into another cast, all with the new wind direction and speed remaining unchanged. I stood stunned, for in a matter of moments the wind had changed from being a light breeze at our backs to a 20 mph continual gust in our faces.
Before too long, we noticed that the walleye bite was gone, along with our desire to still fish there. A quick conference determined that the best move was to find some other place to fish, so we pushed through the growing turbulence of the lake and stumbled our way across the slimy rocks onto the bank.
Fortunately, we had other places in mind that we had prepared for. Although we had not expected to migrate to them so soon, we had planned on them even before we had launched our first cast of the night. In a matter of minutes, we moved to the other side of the island and waded back out into the water. The wind, although still noticeable, was nothing compared to what it was where we had fished only minutes before, and we quickly resumed fishing.
At the end of the night, we had moved a few times to new locations that were strategically located considering the unusual wind. Despite the unforecasted wind patterns, we managed to reel in several nice walleye and could truly call it a successful night of fishing. After the fact, I realized that, had we not planned other fishing locations, our success would have been greatly limited. In our defense, the wind forecast, only minutes before we had left, had predicted a gradual shift that would have enabled us to stay at our original location for hours longer. Had we banked on that, and planned on no other location, we would have been limited to a couple walleye, just because we could not continue fishing due to the wind. Considering this, it is imperative to plan multiple fishing locations in case of an unforeseen change. No one I was fishing with expected the wind to change 180 degrees in a second. But it turned out to be no problem, as we moved with the wind and were successful in doing so. Make sure then, when you go fishing, that you have multiple viable fishing locations in case things change unexpectedly.