Well, we have our first trip to Winnie in the books. Tyler and I had a really good time staying at the South Deer Lake camp site in the Chip. on the Cut Foot Lake. It was really a beautiful place, both the forest and the lake. And the water is so clear on Winni!!!
We left Minneapolis around 6 a.m. on Friday and drove in rain most of the way landing at our site at about 11 a.m. as we had breakfast at Shelly’s (the stuffed hash browns are awesome) in Deer River and also picked up bait at Fred’s. The rain stopped just long enough to set up our tent and the rest of camp and started again shortly after. We sat for a while hoping the rain would stop, but it didn’t and so we decided to head out to the lake. As luck would have it the rain stopped just as we were launching the boat. We headed towards the Tamarac Humps and Tamarac Bay area and found humps that topped out around 13-14 feet of water surrounded by 20+ feet of water. The great majority of the boats were up fishing the shallow flats to the north and south of us and only a hand full of boats were fishing the deeper water humps where we started. At this point we started drifting and pulling rigs with 6-7 foot snells and a red hook with leeches and crawlers and it was game on. We had fish coming fairly throughout the weekend in this area with the exception of when we lost our wind. I’d love to tell you that we used several methods to catch fish over the weekend and that we fished all parts of the lake, but we didn’t have to in order to catch fish. The first 2 days we kept 7 fish to eat and the rest were released. The third day (Sunday) we kept a 2 man limit that only took us about 3.5 hours to get. We did catch our share of small fish and over fish that went back as well, but the majority of the fish we caught were in the size of 15-17 inches.
We will definitely be back next year and even hopefully again this year.
