I predict Friday will be the worst day of fishing on Mille Lacs in decades

We had a much better day on Mille Lacs today than we did last Mon. I think we ended the day with 17 SM and 9 Eyes. Not a great day by Mille Lacs standards but a vast improvement over our last attempt. The water temps are kind of all over the place. On the West side early it was only 51. Shortly there after on the North end it was 57-58. There was no shortage of boats out there. When we left around 3:30 the large landing just N of the casino was totally full with some trailers parking on the road. We didn’t catch any piggies but a few health 18-19” fish. None of the Eyes were big either but all the fish looked real healthy. Saw a fair amount of eyes being caught in a lot of different locations. I think the SM bite is about to explode within the next week. I hope to make it back up there one day this next week.

BHM,if your luck is that bad,I would bet you are related to Patrick Mcmanus,if so,you need to start writing books,I would buy one !!
do you have any friends named crazy Eddy?? lol

Was a different day for us than I expected but very successful nonetheless.

As some had said here the bass bite has been slow. The stagnant water temps to blame. He pointed out a number of bass boats and said how the largie bass guys come up and camp out on the beds. The problem now is with the low temps the females have not moved up on the beds. Any males that are up there have no eggs to protect so they are not aggressive. Females are scattered in deeper water, some pairing up with males and at that stage not aggressively feeding. Seemed Legit. After 15 years of primarily fishing and guiding Mille Lacs I have no reason to doubt him. The boats on the rocky points and reefs on the south end this morning were thick.

So he suggested we chase Walleyes. I hesitantly agreed, I really wanted to score some big bass but again for me, the timing was just off a bit. We left the cove landing and motored all the way up to the NE end. He checked a couple spots and was only marking a few small fish pods so we kept moving. Finally not far off from some other boats (~500 yards) he marked LOTS of fish so we started working that area. I threw out my line and the first jig of my line and I hooked a Wally. Ended up moving a little bit from there and pretty soon we were picking them off in streaks. Of course it didn’t take long for us to get surrounded by boats. Once that happened though we could see we were still betting more than most of the boats. Soon there were about 25 boats working this sand bar, not all right on top of us but enough to push those fish out because soon there were not as many being marked and the bite had all but shut down. With a couple of hours left we pull off that sand bar and started searching for the school. We went about 500 yards I guess and picked them up again and finished the day pretty strong. This really impressed me. He knows the movement of these fish.

Overall the 2 of us landed 34 fish. With Brad occasionally fishing he brought in 10 too so 44 in the boat. I’ll be we easily had 12-15 get off. 3 doubles, one of them almost a triple but one got off. 2 – 25”ers and 1 26”. No shorts either. I’ll bet the shortest was 17-18”. Water temp up there was about 54 degrees with it climbing to 55 by late afternoon.

What a difference color makes. I started out with a blue and white jig. I got hammered right away. Then pink which the other person in the boat has on started working and my blue faded. Later chartreuse was very strong. Funny how the lead would change (who had the most fish) when the color preference changed. I had a five fish lead, then I got passed up with and had a 5 fish deficit and I came back strong and one with a 4 pt lead. Good times.

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AIM has there tournament there this weekend so thats adding around 30 boats, or so i’m told.

Looks like the weather was better then we had south of you.

fishthumper wrote:

None of the Eyes were big either but all the fish looked real healthy.

All of the walleyes I caught on accident look terrible. They are skinny and deathly looking as are the most of the ones posted on here. I realize that it’s post spawn right now but they have looked like this for years now. I honestly think there is a serious lack of food (primarily perch) for them in the lake which would explain why they are so willing to bite and could be why the bigger ones are eating the smaller ones.

I don’t get it either? Maybe those bioligists need to start thinking outside the box. Stock that lake with perch or any other forage

Or (gasp) let some Walleyes be removed from the system. Not only Walleye. If it’s possible to set slots you could also REQUIRE people keep Bass, Pike, Walleye of a certain size. If you can’t increase the forage maybe you can decrease the demand for that forage?

Dutchboy wrote:

Or (gasp) let some <strong class=”ido-tag-strong”>Walleyes be removed from the system. Not only Walleye. If it’s possible to set slots you could also REQUIRE people keep Bass, Pike, Walleye of a certain size. If you can’t increase the forage maybe you can decrease the demand for that forage?

I agree.

Talking with Brad that day about the situation up there with the DNR was a real eye opener. Without trying to recite the details it’s clear that the sportsmen, the guides and other industry businesses (resorts, bait shops etc) up there are the enemy. If not the agreement set 4 years ago would not have been done behind a closed door secret meeting between the DNR and the tribe. One other clear indicator was in a meeting called to help industries it was brought up by Brad sitting right next to Tony Roach about how to possibly address mortally hooked fish, instead of turning loose floaters. The fella from the DNR looked right at them and said “if we do that then we’d have guides cutting gills”. Crazy.

Those secret closed door meetings? Illegal in MN but since they are held on the land of a sovereign nation no foul.

If I understand correctly there is one year left in this 5 year agreement. Although the D-bags that implemented this are either retired, fired or moved, the precedent has been set and the tribe feels entitled.

Had a descent bite Sunday morning. Pretty steady but didn’t kill them.

57.5 degrees north end.

Sounds like I’ll be looking for the big boulders for smallies if I get up there this weekend.

I must be missing something because Friday and Sunday were some of the most epic days smallie fishing on ML I have ever experienced, been doing it prior to it being a “thing”. Feel like you were sold a bill of goods, directed to the low hanging fruit, starving walleyes.

As an FYI, you can jump up in 4′ of water right now and toss a banana with a hook in it and catch 24-26″ walleye all day, cant keep them off plastics.

Regarding Bass boats parked on beds, it happens, not a fan. There is NO challenge to it. The only challenge is to coax a fish into biting a bait for the 10th time in a day. Bassboat guys are NOT the only or biggest issue. I have witnessed countless Windshield boats anchored on beds using live bait. Won’t see too many bass boats doing that.

Just yesterday I was in a popular spawning area fishing pre-stage fish, away from bedding area. I witnessed 2 (Windshield) guys (Neither wearing a facemask mind you) almost come to blows over fishing beds with live bait. One boat rolls in with his little kid and an older gentleman and starts railing a boat of 3 people fishing live bait on beds. The guy is dropping F bombs with his little kid in the boat. The more logical of the 2 eventually left before we had a segment on LIVE PD. The foul mouthed windshield “purist” stayed, chest puffed out. Within 5 minutes of Boat 1 leaving, Joker was throwing leeches on bobbers the beds. His kid will turn out great I am sure.

Last year I watched a “Popular” smallie guide and tournament director sit atop a nest of beds dropping leeches on them with his 2 clients. They will do whatever is needed to get your $.

Here’s a fish I caught on Leech Lake a week ago and my sons fish on Mille Lacs this past weekend. If anything the Mille Lacs fish looks better, but both are skinny because it’s post spawn

I will agree it’s time (past time) to allow a little harvest to avoid a serious forage crash.

This weekend we could see schools of minnows in the shallows by the hundreds if not thousands. The lack of perch is concerning though.

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BTW, nice report BHM. Thank you

Most likely those Minoows you were seeing were perch….. All that I saw were tiny perch.

wormdunker wrote:

Last year I watched a “Popular” smallie guide and tournament director sit atop a nest of beds dropping leeches on them with his 2 clients. They will do whatever is needed to get your $.

Dang, that’s really sketchy and unethical. I don’t bed fish hardly at all and I ain’t gonna target them with live bait either but I will continue to target them with artificial lures in my bass boat. It has become noticeably difficult seemingly every time I go. Clearly the word is out on the bass in this lake and the entire country knows about it now.

Here are a couple of 19 inchers I caught about 15 minutes apart on Friday.

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wormdunker wrote:

As an FYI, you can jump up in 4′ of water right now and toss a banana with a hook in it and catch 24-26″ walleye all day, cant keep them off plastics.

After our Wally excursion we went out in my boat and fished the south end between Izaty’s and the cove, throwing plastics, cranks, hair jigs between 4’-15’, the next morning in kayaks closer to along the shore in 4-10’ with nothing at all.

Here’s a dumb question. I’m a Mille Lacs novice and I’ve never seen a lake infested with the Zebra Mussels like that. Are the white beds of mussels bass spawning beds that have exposed them or are they just dense beds of zebra mussels?

The white beds are dead zeebs. Bass Don’t bed on them.

-J.

Jon Jordan wrote:

Here’s a dumb question. I’m a Mille Lacs novice and I’ve never seen a lake infested with the Zebra Mussels like that.

The density of zebra mussels has actually gone down now out there. It peaked in 2012 but they reached their carrying capacity so its been in decline for years. You can obviously still see that they are quite plentiful though…