The cold temperatures of the past week seem to have brought out the &uot;best&uot; in some of us Minnesota natives. I can’t believe all the whining about the cold temperatures. You’d think that most of the people had just moved up here from the south.

Give us a mild and almost balmy first half of winter and we tend to get a little spoiled. I can remember my dad telling me that when the winter weather set in it was time to put on the long handles and when he felt summer was finally back he would shed them. For the record he had a few pair of them so he wasn’t wearing the same ones all winter.

My dad also gave me this advice about dealing with winter: Wear plenty of clothes when you are going outside. You can always take a layer off if it gets warm but you can’t put on what you don’t have.

This all makes pretty good sense to me now, but when I was a teenager it wasn’t cool to wear a lot of heavy clothing because you didn’t want the girls thinking un-cool thoughts about you. In all reality they probably thought we were pretty dumb anyway for running around in a light jacket in freezing temperatures.

It seems that today’s teenagers can make a fashion statement and still be warm. If you wear a warm camouflage coat it’s cool, and if you have anything with the word &uot;Carhart&uot; on it you are not only warm but also macho cool.

As we head into March a lot of fishermen are starting to think about trout season. Others may be thinking about planning a trip to the Mississippi as soon as we get a little warmer weather

I’ve ventured to the river on a few different occasions and had mixed results. I’ve never been a real big fan of fishing the big river, but if you know what you’re doing it can be a rewarding experience.

One year on the Governor’s Fishing Opener I went to the river and was lucky enough to fish with some guys that really knew what they were doing. Once on the water we traveled a few miles up the backwaters to one of their favorite spots.

We were using a 2-oz. sinker with a 3-way swivel and a Phelps floater tipped with a fathead. Using this set-up, we began back trolling slowly into the current. This method of fishing allowed the weight to become almost vertical and the 5 foot leader that the floater was on danced in the current about 8 inches off the bottom.

In our boat alone we must have caught and released around 50-60 fish. I did bring home a few for the frying pan. There haven’t been many openers where the weather has been very warm but this was the year I fished in just a T-shirt and it was probably the best walleye fishing I’ve had on the opener.

There are a lot of good fishing places in our area of the state. You don’t have to travel hundreds of miles to catch fish if you know where to go.

Sometimes knowing where to go isn’t enough. I have been to lakes before where everybody seems to catch something and I could hardly buy a fish.

I think there is a time that you have to ask the question, &uot;What are they catching them on?&uot; There also comes a time when all the things you think you know about fishing aren’t enough. The answer to what the fish will bite on may not always be in &uot;your&uot; tackle box.

Sometimes a thing as simple as a spinner, split shot and a minnow are the only things that seem to work. Other times fish will be picky on color. Put three guys in the same boat using three different colors of an identical jig and only one of them is catching fish means that two guys will be scrambling through their tackle boxes looking for that &uot;hot&uot; color.

As a kid, whenever I would go fishing with my Uncle Ben we usually fished for northern. The old-timers like my Uncle Ben and his brother-in-law Sam were my idols when I was growing up. They fished a lot and knew how to catch them. The rules were simple and they always seemed to work.

When fishing northern we would troll the weed lines. All this was done by either knowing the lake or just following the contour of the shoreline. It didn’t matter what lure we used as long as it was a Daredevil. Usually one of them would put on a Strip-on with a sucker minnow and the other a red and white Daredevil. If one was having more action than the other the other would switch to that bait.

On an overcast day a black and white Daredevil might be used, and sometimes they would get creative and tip it with a pork rind.

With all the new things they have these days it’s hard to imagine we caught fish years ago. How did we survive without underwater cameras, flashers graphs, locators, PH monitors and of course a GPS to tell you where the heck you were when you caught that big one.

I don’t think keeping things simple is such a bad idea. I still picture this boy in bib overalls and a straw hat sitting under a shade tree on the bank of a lazy stream with a cane pole and a bobber. Putting that picture in my mind has often been a good way to slow down the fast pace we live in these days.