Some restaurants are just better than others, with some; I like the food, because it's great tasting food. Now some hovels of hash, the food not's so good, but I like the servers, let's just say there so attractive I don't mind what the food tastes like, so I go there, choke down a very safe hot beef sandwich, and call it a good looking meal. I have lakes I fish, that serve up in the very same way. If I'm hungry I go to a lake that produces fish every time, time and time again. These meat and potatoes lakes in my life may not be much to look at after all these years, but they dish up consistent fish. But see, sometimes, if I want eye candy, I go to the really steamy fresh rumor, the hot gossip, the you should a been here yesterday lakes, that sound so smoking hot you can't lose, and then, well, there fun for a totally different reason. They make me learn, they cause thought in my daily grind of fishing. These unknown water portals have me checking new depths and sounding the bottom for unseen reefs or casting to semi submerged logs. These rumor waters, they put an edge back on my fishing that the same old, same old, just can't. Over the past two winters me and three others who have much better things to do, because we did the right thing in high school, then higher educating ourselves only to be responsible with regular jobs and try to be socially acceptable adults, decided the heck with all that for a day, and to play the hunch, see if all this salacious gossip was true. Not all the rumor's pan out and more often than not, they don't, but every once in a while you hit a winner. Last week, grinding through the ice, we hit the fish right in the frozen freezer section. Four of us called in sick and tired of everything from snow blindness to spring fever and we huffed it into a lake smothered in untrod upon, crisp, virgin white snow. The hills banked in gloriously green lofted pine's just soared straight up into an azure sky dolloped with fluffy white floating puffs. It was a magic place, a gorgeous day and dang nab it, the fish bit with abandon. Oh we caught em deep, we caught em shallow and sometimes with our hands full, we actually had to set down our liquid antifreeze just to wind up yet another perfect specimen of what the roaring rumor mill, at times can truly provide. The trout whisperer