Spent the better part of Saturday chasing smallies. My “Go To” spots I talked about last week dried up on me, so I went looking for new areas. With the lake up a good 8 inches, water clarity has dropped significantly on most of the shoreline areas I hit. That combined with a post spawn funk made it a tough bite…. Like none for this guy!
Switched over to walleyes for a while. Found the deep gravel areas off Big Point to be holding a lot of fish. Spent some time trolling crawlers/spinners but did not find any takers. Around 3pm, I decided to go over to Macs Twin Bay to see how the RCL tourney guys fared.
There is an interesting report on the Tournament Forum about how many teams weighed fish and the actual number of fish brought to the scales. Made me feel a little better knowing I was not the only one out there getting skunked!! Lol. Congrats again to Chris Tuckner and his Co. on winning the tournament. I’m glad I stopped over to see Tuck. After a little prodding, he pointed me in the right direction. He would not give me the exact spot, but hinted that I should be looking for…. suspended fish near clouds of bait.
After the weigh in and dinner, friend Jamie Frieble and I decide to go casting for Musky as a T-Storm was approaching out of Garrison. I know, I know, what the heck are ya doing going out when a storm is headed in…??? I’ll just add that the area we musky fished was 100 yards out of the boat harbor. We could get off the lake in a hurry if needed. Jamie has spent a lot more time musky fishing than me and insisted that the BEST time for big fish is right before a T-Storm. No fish came to the boat, at least we gave it a good try! Still waiting for my first Mille Lacs Musky.
Sunday…. With Tuck’s pointers, and a fairly late start… (10 am) we head out to the “Deep No-where”. Structureless areas away from the flats in some of the deepest water in the lake. There we found the clouds of bait that Tuck was talking about. We trolled over the top of these fish about 16-19 feet down in 36 feet of water. Took about an hour to get the first fish to go. But after getting the color, speed depth figured out we boated 4 fish in short order. A 25, 26, 26, 27.5 came to the net within a couple hours. As was discussed in the “Trolling the Flats” post from last week, planner boards were key to getting these fish to go. Also, don’t be afraid to get far away from any and all boats…the farther the better. Seems like the farther away from any flat you go to, the higher the fish marked in the water column. Those fish up high are the eager biters.
Good Luck,
Jon J.
Jamie with his first Mille Lace eye’
