Elephant Lake End of July Tackle Tips?

For those who don’t know, Elephant Lake is a Canadian shield lake in northern Minnesota. We will be up there at the end of July smack dab in the middle of mid summer patterns.

So I am planning out tackle I need to stock up on and patterns I’ll be trying. I already have my ideas, but I thought I would see if it jives with fellow IDOers. One of my problems is I usually over stock with tackle I don’t even end up using.

I am interested in hearing about suggestions for chasing the LM/SM Bass and Pike. My brothers pretty much have told me what to bring for walleye and they have their set techniques for finding them.

With the shut down, I can’t link to the lake map on the DNR site, but I will upload a map off my Navionics map when I have a chance. I believe it doesn’t get much deeper than 30′ and the structure is pretty typical. I believe there is also a lot of variance in bottom types throughout the lake.

I fished Elephant about a month ago and the fishing was extremely slow. Did well on walleyes, but the crappie and smallie bite was next to non-existant. The few smallies we did catch were on tubes or Rattltraps. Someone obviously did better than we did on smallies as I found three carcasses in the cleaning shack that were obviously all too big to keep. Anyhow, other than the far north bay most of the bays are your typical rocky/boulder substrate, a few with good weed growth mixed in. The far north bay had a nice classic boulder pile in it, but other than that was nothing more than a shallow bay full of loon [censored] and small stunted sunnies. We also worked the piling area and did well on walleyes…using 1/8 oz mimic minnow heads and paddletails.

We stayed in the old log cabin at Melgeorges and I must say the place was nice, good and reasonably priced food, and great waitstaff. I was a little disappointed in the number of cabins and homes on the lake, however, as I thought it would be more of a getaway than it actually was.

I’ve heard Elephant can be a great lake, but our first trip didn’t reveal that. We are booked for a family vacation again this fall at Melgeorges for a week and hopefully fishing will be better then.

Oh, one other thing, be careful if you anchor off the major point on the south end of the lake as I managed to catch my anchor twice (what are the chances of that?) on what I assume was an underwater electrical line in conduit. I was able to get my anchor back both times but just barely as that conduit gets extremely heavy when you pull it up from 20+ feet of water!

I don’t think we are going to have an issue catching numbers of smallies, but I want to get into some quality fish, so I plan on hitting deeper water. They have always gone up at the end of July and the smallmouth are never hard to find, but the bigger ones may be harder.

I actually want to try some vertical jigging around the pilings for smallies and crappies. However, I don’t think they are in very deep water?

I have been up there once probably 10 years ago when we allowed women. We have always enjoyed our stay at Melgeorges, that’s why we keep going back.

Some, if not all of us are going up a day early to hit Blackduck for one day too.

The pilings averaged around 15′ deep on the lakeside and came up sharply to around 6′ on the shore side. The far right side as you are facing shore had a hole that if I remember right was right around 23′ and that is where we got most of our walleyes during the day, but only a few dink smallies were in that area when I was there. The area screams CRAPPIE, but we didn’t catch any around the pilings. All the crappies we caught were up in the loon [censored] bay I mentioned earlier.

I’m looking forward to staying at Melgeorges again. The food was great and their specials were a heck of a deal! We have the cabin called MAPLE reserved for this september. I hope the smallies are mad that week!

I like to throw Flukes for both Pike and Bass. Seldom get bit off by the Pike but they are fun to catch!

I also use Beetle spins a lot with split tail grubs.

Any color works up there as long as it’s white.

Have fun, it’s a great area up there as you already know.