Opening Week

I just returned from a week of fishing and relaxing on the big water. My Guidewear got as much boat time as I did , every time I hit the water. The only time I was able to shed a few layers was on Tuesday afternoon which were spent out on the mud flats. I fished every day except Wednesday so I missed some of the toughest wind.

I kept a fairly good log of my fishing week. My boat saw 140 fish and of those 28 were slot fish. The largest was 27″ followed closely by a 26 1/2″ , 25″ and a couple at 24″. The bulk of the fish caught were between 18″ and 23″. We had 5 under the slot. There were no perch taken by my boat. This is very unusual because of the time spent on rock reef’s. We did have 1 pout that came on an orange spinner over a sand bottom. The most fun afternoon was Tuesday. It was a bit warmer than most days and we had a nice mud flat bite going. The larger fish were taken there.

I saw a couple of comments on the lack of boats on the water. We noticed the same thing in the Big Point area. There did not appear to be as many as years past.

It was entertaining to see all of the big walleye rigs out on the water because of the tournements that took place last weekend. I was able to speak with a few fishermen and also gave directions to a couple of boats that were lost. It seems strange that with the maps available , and the use of GPS these days , that someone would actually admit they had no clue as to where we were at on the water.

I am looking forward to a 4 day weekend to get more boat time. What a fantastic fishery.

Dino

Great post Dinosaur. I too enjoyed seeing all the big fiberglass boats zipping by. I mentioned in another thread I was short on slot fish. My ratio has been smaller than most of the posts I have seen here and elsewhere. Oh well, I’ll take Mille Lacs fishing any day.

We started on Mille Lacs at Midnight of the opener for a couple hours, then went to Woman Lake – where it was DEAD. You tend to forget about slot limits in a hurry when you aren’t catching anything. We decided to head back to Mille Lacs on Sunday and fished it through Tuesday. We also gave it a whirl for about an hour on Wednesday but bagged it because we didn’t want to fight the wind and it was time to get back. I returned to the scene of the crime on Saturday and the bite was still going strong. Aside from the lack of slot fish, my time on the water was very similar to yours with the average sizes and big fish.