This was Kim’s first trip to the Rainy River and we couldn’t have asked for better weather, well, except for Friday and Saturday afternoon. Besides the nice weather on Wednesdaay and Thursday, Friday and Saturday were pretty typical days for the spring run. She told me that she actually loved it. We planned to come back on Saturday afternoon, but it was easy to convince her to stay one more night even though we hadn’t showered since Tuesday.
We started out at Birchdale with little traffic on the river on Wednesday, and had some trouble getting the walleyes to bite. I missed a couple bites and never converted. Plan B was to sturgeon fish for a couple hours. That turned out to be a good chioce. We managed to catch 6 with only two being under 50″. She got her first, second and third over 50″, with one reaching past 60″! That was a great battle and I got some of it on video. We actualluy picked up more walleyes and saugers that day by sturgeon fishing than actuallytargeting them. The first walley of the trip ended up being 26″. I think we did manage to land 12 walleyes that day. When we got back to the Nelson landing, the DNR survay lady was telling us how great the fishing was on Monday and Tuesday and how bad it was on Wednesday. She said that the water clarity dropped some and shuth the fish off. Not what I wanted to hear.
So, we decided to give it another go on Thursday at Birchdale. We did pretty much the same thing only this time we went a little further down, by the Pinewood church. Caught one sturgeon on a jig and left to try for sturgeon again. Even sturgeon fishing was very slow so I made a call to a coworker that was coming up on Friday night. He told me how the water was clearer near the lake and contemplated packing up the “man sleeper” (new term I learned this weekend for a pickup camper) and the boat to head for Baudette. Well, that was the decision we made, and a good one!
We got the Baudette to fill up with gas and was greeted at the gas station by a guy that just left the river telling me to get to 4 mile bay ASAP because they just left after catching over 110 eyes in a half day. That drive from Baudette seemed longer than that trip from East Bethel to Birchdale. We couldn’t wait. We arrived at the landing about 3:30 and Kim got to experience the Rainy River chaos at the landing first hand. The place was crawling and you could see the determination on everyones faces. We got out to 4 Mile Bay by about 4:30 or so and pounded the walleyes for about 2.5 hours before the sun set. She also got to experience the Rainy at is best as well! 
Friday was a different story. It rained overnight, all night, and woke up to more boats and dirtier water. Much like Birchdale. We were worried. We passed up the impassable crowd at 4 Mile Bay and headed for the gap. The temp at the gap was at least 15 degrees cooler than in the bay and found out that we were slightly under dressed for it but fished anyway. What an errie feeling being surrounded by fog, ice and other boats. Boats would just appear out of nowhere. We managed about 15 walleyes until we got too cold and headed back into the bay. Overall, Friday fishing was good but not near as good just 15 hours before.
Saturday we cought only one walleye and 3 sturgeon. 2 of which were 55″ x 21″ tagged sturgeon.
I really have to let everyone know that we had a great experience at River Bend Resort which is under new ownership. I would highly recommend this place to anyone. Great new people running the place! 
I’ll post the story about how we decided where to stay later.
, or just charged too much for what they had. 