My wife and I will be making our first ever trip to Vermillion for Labor Day weekend. We will be camping at McKinley Park and will have my 16″ boat. I would love to target smallies and eyes but realize that my range is limited. Any suggestions where I should start? Any info is appreciated.
Greg
We focus on live bait on Vermilion for walleye, but I do hear that people do OK shad raps too. I would think the main smallie forage would be crayfish, we run into some really nice ones, but I have never targeted them.
As DaveB suggested, explore the rock piles and islands to the east of the park, between Ely Island and the south shore, including Stuntz bay.
Careful inside Seven Sisters islands. You can usually go east and west through them, in high water years, but don’t try to go north and south through them.
Vermilion can be fickle…sometimes you start out in the middle of snapping walleyes the first evening, high five-ing each other as the live well fills up and the next day and every day after that they are gone…nowhere to be found. They move around out there and the experienced anglers or guides can still find them. As others have suggested, live bait is a good starting option right away. Smallmouth I’ve found can be nice bonus fish when walleye searching. If you exclusively target smallmouth, they will be few and far between and you will spend alot of time when you can locate walleye/perch congregations and you may get that smallmouth bonus. Pike can show up anywhere but Vermilion is no hammer handle lake and while numbers are lower, size is much bigger! One last word of warning…if traveling around or across Big Bay, it can go from calm and peaceful to ravaging and angry in a matter of minutes. Anyway, ’tis a beautiful area and lake, (big) but so much to explore!
Thank you for all of the information. What are typically good colors to start with? I was thinking about picking up some Rapala SSR’s to troll for pike/musky.
Greg
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