Ice out on Rainy River - Lake of the Woods (LOTW) & Rainy River - Lake of the Woods (LOTW) & Rainy River

Looks like thing are ahead of schedule this year!

Northern MN anglers fishing in open water

Updated: 01/18/2006 06:38:08 PM
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BIRCHDALE, Minn. (AP) – The Rainy River along the Minnesota-Ontario border was alive with signs of spring this month.

An occasional bald eagle soared overhead, on lookout for a quick meal along the shoreline or floating on the river’s open water. A couple of boats drifted among the small icebergs that had formed after the mercury dipped to a brutal 1 below zero a couple of nights earlier.

Temperatures now hovered in the mid 30s, and the shining sun, a scarce presence in recent weeks, reflected brilliantly off the blanket of snow that covered the shoreline.

This is the way the Rainy River always looks in spring, as anglers rush to get their first glimpse of open water after months of fishing through holes in the ice. Anytime from mid-March through early April, it happens, the big river gives up its ice and opens its wide arms to spring.

But January? It’s not supposed to happen in January.

“They’re biting,” Tom Stay of Baudette said as he steered his 14-foot duckboat between the icebergs and brought it to rest with a resounding crunch along the shoreline at the Nelson Park Landing in Birchdale. Less than two hours earlier, he and a buddy, Steve “Mo” Mollberg of Baudette, had slid the boat down the ice-covered ramp and into the open water.

Stay might have been wearing a cap advertising a popular brand of ice auger, but he certainly wasn’t lamenting his lack of ice time on this day. A longtime fishing guide, Stay says this year’s “Winter That Isn’t” has given him the opportunity for the first time to fish the Rainy from a boat in January.

He’s done it in December before, he said, even February.

But never January.

“I can now say I’ve fished it in open water every month of the year,” he said.

Stay and Mollberg already had landed a half-dozen walleyes. Eaters mostly, golden beauties that would brighten even the darkest January day. Stay also had released a 24½-incher, an egg-laden female that would weigh more than 5 pounds this time of year.

“The river has been open for a while down here,” Stay said. “Prior to Saturday, no one was fishing.”

Three days earlier, Stay and his son, David; his brother, Bill; and another friend, Mark Chwialkowski, had ventured out in two boats to try their luck on the walleyes that surely lurked below the river’s ice-free surface. The Rainy at Birchdale was open shore to shore that day, Stay said, with no sign of the icebergs that now littered the surface.

“Me and my kid came out without a motor,” Stay said. “Bill dragged us out, we dropped the anchor and started spanking them right away. We caught 18 walleyes in 2½ hours that day.”

The next afternoon was a little slower, he said, but they still caught fish, including a chunky 26-inch walleye. There was nothing fancy about the technique, Stay said, just drop anchor mid-river and bounce a ¼-ounce jig off the bottom.

“They weren’t really banging it like the early spring bite, when they just thump it,” Stay said. “A couple of the walleyes did, but most of them just grabbed it. Picture your bobber slowly going down the hole.”

He said a big sturgeon even poked its head out of the water on one occasion. Perhaps, it was confused by the lack of ice and wanted a closer look at how strange this winter actually is.

Credit a mild winter, a wet fall and strong current for the Rainy River’s early boat-fishing opportunities. Most winters, the river is open about 10 miles downstream from International Falls and frozen the rest of the way to Lake of the Woods. But this winter, officials say, there hasn’t been enough cold weather to form good ice farther downstream.

According to Mike Larson, area fisheries supervisor for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources in Baudette, water in the Rainy River is flowing at about 20,000 cubic feet per second. By comparison, flow on the Red River in Grand Forks is about 3,500 cubic feet per second.

“There’s a lot of water flow coming down the river,” Larson said last week. “People are pulling fish houses off the river (in Baudette), and the weather doesn’t look like it’s going to get any better, either. We’ve only had a couple of days below zero.

“That whole watershed is releasing water. We had a wet fall, in spots, so that water has been able to continue to run. There hasn’t been anything tied up by frost and ice formation.”

Conditions on the U.S. side of Lake of the Woods are good, though, and resorts along the south shore report a solid 16 to 20 inches of ice.

While the DNR doesn’t keep records of ice-out at Birchdale, Larson says it happens in late March most years. There are exceptions, though, including 1998, when the river opened all the way to Baudette in February before refreezing for a few weeks.

Larson says he’s hoping the ice returns this year, too. Otherwise, he said, the springlike conditions could trigger an early walleye-spawning run, which could reduce hatchling survival when a cold front hits, as it inevitably will.

“The lack of ice goes throughout the whole system,” Larson said. “Up in the Canadian waters, where there’s channels that typically have little ice, there’s the probability it’s going to be open. Small streams are opening up, frost is leaving the ground, so it’s happening all over the place.”