Greeting all,
I feel like I need at least make mention of why I’ve been absent with a timely river report here at FTR for the last couple weeks. No, I didn’t quit fishing, I had a bunch of guide trips on Mille Lacs. Those dates went INCREDIBLY well as we ran into large numbers of mongo sized eyes, several over 10 Lb’s, and some 15 – 20 Lb. pike at night. Hop on over to fishthelake.com for a look at some of the photos from these trips as well as some discussion about the bite on that great body of water.
Today was my first day back on pool 4 in a couple weeks and the fishing certainly wasn’t rumored to be going very well lately for most that I had communicated with. I started the AM by working some areas off the main channel….. fallen timber near noticeable current is usually a good place to start this time of year…. but not today. Nada. Even the crappies wouldn’t cooperate in the morning and in talking with neighboring boats the message was pretty consistent….”no fish.” A tough bite all around.
So we opted for a radical change of location and moved out onto the lake itself and decided to start pounding shorelines with cranks. Good move! 3 casts into the day we landed a super nice walleye about 8 Lb’s and followed that up shortly with a couple more over 20″ from the same general area before the action died and forced us to move to find the remainder of our fish for the day. Fish willing to snap at a crank were very isolated today as we just never found a spot that held any kind of concentration of fish looking to feed. “Fish it once well and move on” worked for us today as a repeated pass through an area did not result an any extra fish.
Small cranks pitched shallow and retrieved quickly did the trick and we also managed a few smallies as well. Firetiger and craw were the two most productive patterns for us today. We did try some experimenting with hair and plastics but we just couldn’t get anything going with those presentations. Look for those two patterns to begin to emerge as dominent presentations in the next couple weeks as the water temps continue to fall.
James Holst
Moving Waters Guide Service
http://www.movingwaters.net