There are a ton of popular fishing areas accessible from some of the streets right in Mobridge, or you can crosss the bridge and use some of the boat ramps and recreation areas scattered thoughout the region. The amount of good looking areas is daunting. We had the use of two brand new Polaris snowmobiles so we were ready to be mobile. What we were not too prepared for was how brutal the wind would be and the temps were dropping all through Friday and into Saturday.
We were there for the Mobridge Chamber Fishing Tourney, and this would be our second shot at cracking the secrets of the area. We took off from a beach to try to get some pre-fishing in, went across the lake and hit an area the locals call Dead Mans. We ended up on a 28 foot flat which went right into deep water. Started shallow and moved deeper and kept switching up the lures to see what was working. We caught and kept a few northerns, a 5lb channel cat, some small perch and a few dink walleye. Since tourney rules stated we needed to be off the lake by 4pm we were packing up during prime time and the red lines on the Vex were starting to shoot up while the lure came down were good signs that we were close to where we would want to be the following day.
Saturday we headed out to the same area, just started deeper. We were getting very light bumps and a few dinks were caught. The tourney has a 14 inch min length, so we had to keep punching holes. We must have hit a cat hole in about 40 fow cause we all tussled with cats, some up to 6 lbs, each time we thought “here we go, a big walleye!”, just to see a big bucket head come up the hole. We caught a couple smallies, and a few walleyes real close to 14 inches which we kept, then at 5pm the light switch went on and our 2 team group of 4 kept 3 walleye and one sauger and had multiple throwbacks of those just a shade under 14. We needed to be back to drop our fish off before 7pm, so again, I’m sure we cut our prime time fishing hour off, but we were ready to get warmed up.
We saw some big girls getting pulled from buckets and figured we wouldn’t go far with our teams 17 1/2 and 2 14 1/2, and we ended up 83rd out of 450 teams. The big girl came in at 8.7 lbs. big pike was 15 lbs. As usual, the “you should have been here last week” pictures were circulated and there were multiple 10 lbers and even an honest 12, and this is what keeps us going. We will be back next year, and here’s a couple pics from my camera.
