Here it is, the lull before the storm &045; the Super Bowl of fishing, the week before the opener. This next weekend will bring out almost everyone that has ever wet a line, and some who are about to try it for the first time.

About five openers ago, I started the season on Big Winnie. We put the boat in on Little Cutfoot and worked our way out into the big lake to ride the high waves with about 300 other boats that had decided to fish the same bay. We caught fish and, except for an occasional light rain and the high winds, the weather wasn’t all that bad. As the day came to an end and we prepared to take the boat out and head back to town, I guess it was at that time I realized how enormous the fishing opener really was.

We had parked our truck and trailer about half a mile away and were only at about the halfway point of the line of trucks and trailers. It was quite a sight to see.

Quite a few years ago my son Brian and I went to Lake Francis for the opener. It was one cold and miserable day &045; windy, misty and cold. We caught just a couple of fish and had to fight the lineup of boats and vehicles just to put the boat in and take it out. That was when I decided that I would take the opener off and go on the following weekends.

It was less stressful and maybe even more productive. I enjoyed staying close to home on the opener and I seemed to be getting the most out of waiting one more week to fish the &uot;Big Ones.&uot;

Going the next week still brought out plenty of boats, but there wasn’t that feeling of urgency that seemed to surround the opener.

Jim, the Tribune’s Sports Editor, changed all that for me a few years ago when he asked if I would like to cover the Governor’s Opener. It took a little convincing, but now I actually look forward to fishing the opener every year.

This year the opener is hosted by Detroit Lakes, and I am looking forward to going to an area I haven’t fished yet. I would love to wet a line in every lake in the state, but that’s not realistic.

Over the years I have fished more than 20 lakes in the Waterville, Elysian and Faribault areas, and there are many more that haven’t been visited yet.

This just shows the magnitude of the lakes we have in our state. If one person has fished that many lakes in one small area of the state, you can imagine the number of lakes we have available to us throughout the whole state.

We’re considered farm country in this part of the state, not fishing country. Well, I really have to say that you can drive a lot of miles to catch less fish than can be caught right here in our own back yard.

I think that every fisherman who has fished this area has one or two favorites they feel will always produce for them. For many years Reed’s lake was my favorite, and I plan on hitting it again this year. Tetonka is probably my favorite lake of the area just because of the years I have fished it and gotten to know it.

Learning a lake is just a matter of fishing it over and over. The larger the lake the more possibilities. A lake with structure is good, but there also can be such a thing as almost having too much structure.

That’s when knowing the lake really pays off, and it can cut your time when hunting for the active ones. If you’ve caught them in a certain spot before they may be there again, but not necessarily at the same time. You may want to check your favorite haunts more than once in a day because the fish may still be feeding in that area but on a different time table.

The bottom line for me is that I tend to enjoy the time spent on the water searching for fish almost as much as the catching, but catching is a good thing. When I look across a body of water at a certain spot on a lake and think &uot;There’s got to be fish there,&uot; I remember that that’s what kept me excited about fishing as a kid and that’s what keeps me coming back now.

Owning an underwater camera will never be an option for me. That’s because the kid in me still wants to leave something to the imagination.

Good luck, Good Fishin’ and have a safe opener.

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Keep supporting our troops; they are still over there serving our country.

Dick Herfindal is the Tribune’s outdoors columnist. His column appears Sundays.