Rainy Lake Mid august!

Whats up all!

I am so excited to have the opportunity to head up to Rainy for a second time this year. Our annual trip is in early june which was a great trip per usual, this time we are headed up August 13th-17th.

We are staying on Big Island, not my first, second or even third choice but booking late it was really one of the only few sites left. Hey I’d take a bad site on Rainy then any good job site at home.

I have seen a few guide services posting monster Eyes and Northerns the past few weeks that is what has prompted me to get back up.

Has anyone been up recently, or go this time of year regularly? Any info/advise would be great.

Im not super familiar with big island but we were up there early july and id assume walleyes are still on mid lake reefs. We did well on ones that top out between 15-10ft. Still fish the deeper areas of the hump we pulled a lot off of 15-20ft on those same humps if there was a flat in that depth. Smallies were pretty good too on shoreline structure but they have probably moved out by now. Good luck!

First 5 years I did Rainy in August, have since switched to spring. For walleyes would agree on mid lake reefs. Lightest jig you can keep bottom contact with a crawler. I’ll be curious to see how this bite is affected by modern electronics. With basic down imaging fish are easy to spot with the depth. With better electronics there are a limited number of reefs that could be thinned out pretty easy. Even back then I located some smaller rock piles that were not obvious on maps and had better luck later in the season. We did pick up a few pulling harnesses around the islands, 15fow. No big ones or huge numbers, but it was soon after the new size regs. Lots of small northerns in the weeds shallow, but the best luck I had on bigger northerns was bycatch fishing deep rock banks for smallmouth. Smallmouth are usually available on rock humps or banks, but most were smaller. Bigger fish seem to show up Sept-Oct.

Didn’t see this until now so it’s to late to help you out but please let us know how your trip went when you get back. It seems like most of the guides fish on the Canadian where there is way less pressure and a much better size structure of fish. We usually fish the US side and the previous two weeks had been a little tough but last Friday it was like someone flipped a switch and it was game on again. Like said above, finding structure that’s not on the map chip is huge! Obvious spots get picked over very quickly.