First Time to Southern Shore of LOTW

I’m heading up to LOTW Wednesday through Sunday with my dad and brothers. We’re staying at Arnesens. Based on my research it looks like the way to fish this is jigs and crawler harnesses around the reefs and leadcore in the mud. This is my first trip to the southern shore (I’ve been up to the NW Angle a few times). If anyone has any advice I would appreciate it. I’ll post pictures (hopefully). Thanks!

I’ve only been up there once in summer to target walleyes, but I try to follow the patterns. I would think that most guys are running up to the Islands or fishing deeper.

We did well on big gold jigs (3/4 or 1 oz) with a frozen shiner or pulling crawlers / spinners like you said. Also got some on shad raps but that was mid June. I would guess you would need downriggers or leadcore for cranks right now.

Let us know.

Check out the Video on the IDO Home page. They were just up there last week hammerin em on cranks.

This is from last week. We were up there from Thursday until Sunday and we were able to do well with the same technique. Sounds like the guides use jigs for maybe the first hour / lower light and then switch to crawler harnesses. Crawler harness in the mud basin work well also.

Thanks everyone. After watching the video I can’t wait to be up there! How do you decide where to start trolling? That is a huge piece of water. Do you drive around until you start marking fish? Or get lures in the water and start cruising until you start catching?

I think your best bet is to troll cranks in the mud, cover some water. Could always try jigging or slip bobbers off the reefs in the evenings, but we’ve had way better luck this time of year trolling.

We prefer downriggers to leadcore, but not every boat has riggers on it. The good news with leadcore is you can literally troll with the wind for miles, so you aren’t constantly resetting lines, which can be annoying.

Try changing up your trolling speed as well, slow down, speed up, every now and then. That seemed to trigger bites for us last time I was up there.

Find the fish, fish the fish and try to stay on them.

Brewer wrote:

Thanks everyone. After watching the video I can’t wait to be up there! How do you decide where to start trolling? That is a huge piece of water. Do you drive around until you start marking fish? Or get lures in the water and start cruising until you start catching?

We fish out of Arnesen’s, and unless it’s dead calm, we let the wind dictate where we fish. At least with downriggers it’s just way easier to troll with the wind, and way more comfortable.

If it’s an east wind, we’ll troll straight west out of Arnesen’s towards warroad, I want to say we are normally in like 26-32 feet of water, so we just start trolling once we’ve hit the main basin depths. Sometimes we have good luck as we troll past reefs and sometimes the fish are just randomly cruising the basin(you’ll mark big bait balls out there every now and again).

We will just keep trolling in that direction unless we pickup a bunch of fish in one spot, then we will mark that spot and troll back through it a few times.

Not sure what kind of boat you have, but keep an eye on the weather, the wind can pickup quick out there and if you are trolling away from home it’s very easy to find yourself 8 miles out. There aren’t any places to hide out there!

Oh yeah, I forgot a lot of boats running down riggers.

Yeah, look for fish if you want. We did this at higher speed and didn’t mark many. We slowed to trolling speed and started marking them. We just started trolling in the middle of nowhere and started catching them. I think they are scattered all over the basin. We talked to people that fished in many different parts of the lake and they were all doing good.

Phil’s advice is spot on.

You’ve got the right idea. Everything you mentioned is working and big fish are quite easy to catch right now. Don’t drop a line until you see fish on your depth finder and you’ll have no trouble finding them either on the mud flats or around structure. My wife and I really enjoy trolling cranks with snap weights and we’ve been trolling cranks in anywhere from 24 to 34 feet for the past 3 weeks or so in different areas. The fishing has been very good in every area we’ve fished and there are days where we catch almost all slot fish. It’s a lot of fun on LOTW right now. There are some nice saugers in spots to go with the walleyes as well.
It’s not uncommon for us to leave home at 6am, drive 2.5 to 3 hours to get to the lake, get two limits of walleyes and saugers, and be home again before 4:30 pm. The fishing has been pretty amazing this summer.

Thanks for all of the info! I’ll let you all know how it goes.

Had 14 in the slot today on big spinners in 33 ft of water a 29, 5 28 and over and 2 27s + others. Great day

Nice job grizzly, that is a heck of a day!

It was great. Had to come home for a couple weeks can’t wait to get back up there

I bet, I feel the same way. We came home Sunday and we are going back up Labor Day weekend, I can’t wait. Lots of fun!

We have the camper up there for the season, we are now looking for something to buy up there that is reasonable so if anyone knows of something let me know

grizzly wrote:

We have the camper up there for the season, we are now looking for something to buy up there that is reasonable so if anyone knows of something let me know

I’d contact Arnesen’s, they have a ton of trailers up there, some might be for sale. Otherwise, they might have some open lots available as well, seems like they are always adding lots!

philtickelson wrote:

<div class=”d4p-bbt-quote-title”>grizzly wrote:</div>
We have the camper up there for the season, we are now looking for something to buy up there that is reasonable so if anyone knows of something let me know

I’d contact Arnesen’s, they have a ton of trailers up there, some might be for sale. Otherwise, they might have some open lots available as well, seems like they are always adding lots!

im kinda looking more towards long point or towards the river, I looked in there and its kinda packed in there but thanks anyway.

We got blown off the water pretty early yesterday. Today we started trolling cranks and came up with only a couple sauger. After switching to spinners with crawlers we started doing much better. 30-34 feet of water. Purple and perch were our best colors. We’ll try again tomorrow.