Holiday Lake Derby

This past Saturday was a unique opportunity I couldn't pass up.  Holiday Lake, located near Brooklyn, IA held an open fishing day/derby.  Anyone could pay $20 to enter in the event and fish the lake for a day, enjoy lunch and talk with the nearly 400 anglers that showed up.  There were also dozens of prizes donated from businesses to help the event raise money.  The main purpose for the event was to raise money for the fish committee of the lake.  They have numerous fish structures in the lake, and have an extensive stocking program to make the fishing opportunities for the land owners a positive one year-round.  364 days a year the lake is closed to the public, only land owners in the Holiday Lake Association can fish the private lake.  Like I said, this was a unique opportunity to chase down the famous gills and perch that I have heard about in this lake.

The turnout for the event was probably more than the committee expected.  Over 400 anglers showed up to participate in the special fishing day.  I traveled down to the lake with David Gissell and met 3 friends from the Des Moines area to fish for the morning.  No contour maps are available for the lake so the plan was simple...drill as many holes as possible and hop around to see where the fish were holding for the day.  At times we had 3 different augers punching holes at the same time, covering water and constantly keeping the Vexilars in the water looking for the fish.  We focused on the northeast cove and ended up with a pretty consistent bite for gills.  Each guy in the group caught their limit of 10 gills or were within a fish or two of that feat.  David caught the only crappie, a nice 12+ incher.  I ended up with the only 2 perch in the group, one that measured just over 12 inches.  The group caught a couple walleyes as well.  All-in-all it was a good fishing morning, as most of the gills we caught were of keeper size.  We never found any structure to fish, so focusing on depths of water and the imaginary contour map we were creating with the augers and Vexilars kept us actively on fish.  Down sizing jigs seemed to help after the first couple of hours of fishing, helping us to catch fish all the way up to the 1pm lunch time.

A big thanks to the Holiday Lake fish committee for making this day possible for anglers to try a different location to fish during the winter.  Below is the flier from this year, and hopefully they will have a similar event next year, if they do, I highly suggest giving it a try.