From the looks of the weather forecast, March will probably be going out like a lion. I often wondered who coined all the various old &uot;isms&uot; we used to hear ourselves saying quite often.

These sayings probably fall into the same category as &uot;old wives tales.&uot; I guess some of the old remedies we used to try years ago seem pretty far-fetched by today’s standards.

April Fools day is just around the corner. I can remember when it was a day that everyone went out of his or her way to pull a practical joke on someone.

Mom would always try to get someone to fall for the old robin-in-the-back yard trick. &uot;Look, there’s our first robin in the bird bath this year.&uot; As a naive and receptive kid I would remember looking all over the back yard for that dumb robin and never see it. The sly grin on mom’s face would finally give her away.

I guess robins have always been kind of a telltale sign of spring. Once they are back and establishing their nests you know that, outside of an occasional snowy setback, spring and warmer weather will soon follow.

I don’t really know when I quit falling for the robin trick and started letting mom think I still was, but it doesn’t matter. It was kind of our spring ritual, and, as I think back, I might have fallen for it for real not too long before mom passed away.

I guess the robin thing is just a way to look for some hope that the season has turned and we are ready to head into the next phase.

With the open water in the channel it shouldn’t be too long before the shore will be lined with anglers hoping for that early-season catch of nice perch or crappie. Mid-April is usually when you start to see the crappie congregating in the shallows. Crappie fishing can be very good in the spring and sometimes the best crappie fishing is in the early spring.

I can remember back in the early ’70s going out on old Highway 13 and fishing along the banks of the creek that flows into Edgewater Bay. We would catch some descent crappies, not many slabs but some nice ones. There were also bass and northern caught occasionally.

Years ago I would always go to one of the lakes around Waterville on opening weekend, but as the years went by the accesses became more and more crowded.

My favorite lake for many years was Reed’s Lake by Elysian. I always seemed to have good luck there but eventually it was almost wall-to-wall boats on opening day and it got to be a challenge just to put the boat in and try taking it out again. I believe the last opener I spent on that lake I left feeling that there should be just one more law and that would require turn signals on fishing boats. I probably shouldn’t say that or someone with too much time on their hands will try making it into one.

One year, for a change of pace, I thought I would try Fountain Lake on the opener. My boys and I trolled around Edgewater Bay and right in front of where the creek flowed in we were picking up some nice walleye. This was before too many people had even thought about fishing walleye in the lake.

Eventually the runoff that was washed into the bay by the creek has pretty much filled in any deep water that might have existed off the end of the creek. There was also a little park to the south of that bridge that people would come to and fish in the evening. I can remember many evenings taking my mother and my family and shore fishing for crappie, bullhead or an occasional bass or northern.

My boys would usually keep me busy taking off fish or baiting hooks so I sometimes didn’t have time to help my wife, who wouldn’t touch a nightcrawler on a bet. She did however learn to improvise. She could bait a hook and take a fish off with the best of them and all she needed was a needle nose pliers and a Kleenex, and not once did she touch bait or fish.

While some of the structure of our lakes may have changed, the passion for fishing them is still there. I guess the challenge in fishing any lake is finding where the fish will bite this year. Where they were caught on the first week of June in ’02 doesn’t mean they will be there that same week this year.