My girlfriend Carla and I were up to Mille Lacs for a nice little weekend this last weekend. We stayed at Appeldoorn’s Sunset Bay in one of their beautiful cabins and were hoping to do a little bit of fishing, visit Father Hennepin & Mille Lacs Kathio state parks, and just have a nice weekend.
I haven’t taken her trolling for walleyes yet and I was hoping this would be a good chance to do it. The weather was not looking good for us on Saturday. Rain and Wind. The lake was rocking on the east side and wasn’t sure if we could even get out in my 16′ boat. We decided to take a drive around the lake and thankfully found much better water on the west side so the plan was to head out to troll at dark.
The good news is I was able to fish one of my favorite areas. My Humminbird is littered with trails and waypoints of fish here so at least I wasn’t fishing blind. We started out trolling shad raps on leadcore as I wanted to stay off the edge. Tried to move around from 14-20′ thinking this would give me the best shot at catching something as the shallow water trolling reports from the previous weekend on here have been terrible. After about an hour, I finally hooked up with a 22 incher. I wish that wouldn’t have happened because I then kept on the leadcore deeper water pattern longer than I should have.
About 10pm or so, I gave up on that and switched to flatlining SSR-5 Shallow Shad Raps in about 7-8′ of water with some weeds. In this area I can troll on top of and through the weeds so we’re only running our baits 3-4′ down. I was going to take one pass across this area and call it a night unless something happened. 5 minutes into this troll, I stuck another fish, a nice fat 23 incher. I just said you have to be kidding me because this is what I was planning to do all night.
As soon as I got the boat back on track and our lures running, I got hit again. I’m getting mad at this point because I want her to be catching the fish. I tried handing my rod off several times but she wanted nothing to do with it. As I’m fighting this fish, it was definitely nicer, much nicer… and in fact the biggest walleye I’ve ever caught out of Lake Mille Lacs. Carla did a fantastic job with the net and we soon had a very conservatively measured 29-1/2″ fish laying in the bottom of the boat. Alot of guys would have measured this one to 30″ but with mouth shut on the bumpboard and tail pinched, we were at 29-1/2″. We worked the area a little more… Carla hooked up with a fish that shook loose right away which was a big bummer.
About this time the wind switched on us and it was getting pretty bumpy… particularly in my boat. We took our time getting back in in the dark and we’re pretty dang happy with the night. 
Water Temps were 63.5 degrees
Speed was anywhere from 1.6 to 2.0 mph
So we landed 3 fish – a 22″, 23″ and 29-1/2″ and lost 1 more. All 3 were hooked on the back hook of the crank and 2 popped loose in the net so they definitely weren’t inhaling the bait.
