Back in action

I haven’t been on the water as much this summer as the previous two. Moving, two weddings, and some non-fishing vacation has taken a bite out of my fishing time. My regular Mille Lacs outings have been hurt the worst. I’m fishing Mille Lacs tomorrow for only the second time this summer . The good news is I have gotten into some good walleye fishing at the family cabin so my outings there have actually increased this year. My overall net for outings is down though.

I plan to start by pulling crawler harnesses with spinners around a couple flats but will then quickly punt to trolling cranks around the flats and no-man’s land. Am I off base?

Just a heads up on the crank bite out there right now. The fish are out there but very picky when it comes to getting them to go. One of the biggest keys for us has been to pick up the pace dramatically when trolling. 2.5-3.0 mph has been the norm. Troll some cranks that do well with this kind of speed and cover some ground. You will eventually tangle with some fish that get triggered by the speed so hang in there. It has been slow overall lately out there.
Good luck to you and let us know how it goes!

I figured I got to posting that a little late. Of course I didn’t see your response until this morning. I did a fair amount of trolling, but at my “normal” late summer speed – about 2.2 mph. I marked things here and there in no-man’s land but didn’t get anything to bite. I was running a reef runner on one line and a yo-zuri on the other. I did pass through a HUGE school of “something” at one point and it had my interest up enough to pass over it again but nothing bit. The massive numbers in this school led me to believe it was likely something other than walleyes… or they were negative in feeding. I wish I could go back in time to pass over them at a faster speed.

Although I got a bit of a late start, it was a beautiful day on Mille Lacs. It felt good just to be out there. We didn’t exactly clean the lake out… just two walleyes, and one was actually a slot fish. It was s l o w to say the least. Believe it or not, those two fish were the only ones I saw caught all day and that included a Launch that stopped by just as I was finishing up pulling spinners on Bannana flat. That flat was their third stop and they only had a single little perch to show for 20 guys on board.

I figured it was bad when I finally caught the first of the two walleyes and a near-by boat started giving me the 20 questions routine before I even had the thing landed.

It is amazing what a year can do. It really shows how the DNR, natives, and anglers shouldn’t have knee jerk reactions over a single year. I’m guessing the natives won’t be setting any court dates over this year’s harvest .

I was out on Saturday. Chased muskies until noon. Not much happening… talked to quite a few guys, and only a couple had even raised a fish. So, I was going to hit the south end for smallies. I was on my way when I noticed 3 loons out there. I didn’t have my Navronics map, so I had no idea where I was, but started marking fish right away. I didn’t bring my trolling rods, so I set a muskie rig with a ReefRunner. First pass produced a 25″… right as I was coming up the edge a flat. Speed was 3.0-3.1. After a few more passes, I ended up with 4 more fish for the day, 27″ being the biggest. It was dead calm for a spell out there, and could see what I thought were ciscoes dimpling the surface. Upon closer inspection, I realized that they were perch…. MILLIONS of them. About 1″ long. At times they were so thick that they would throw my LCD off, and it would be reading 7 feet! Never did chase any smallies… I tried for muskies again once the sun got lower, and clouds started moving in.