Bitter Lake SD quick report

on the way home from Mobridge we stopped by Biter Lake to see what was going on. Saw plenty of people moving around in full sized trucks, so we drove on and went to a spot we had punched into the GPS last year. In about 30 FOW we puched a few holes and in a few minutes we were marking some fish. Due to the cold front we thought we would have to work through a few spots to find a few fish. The red marks took a bit of coaxing, but sure enough we were on to some mighty fine fish. Fished for 3 1/2 hours, brought home 17 perch between 12 and 10 inches, and their bellies were birsting. Perch and gold 1/8 oz kastmaster and a head of the minnow. The walleyes moved in about dusk, about 12 in 10 minutes, but they were around 10 inches. We had plenty of walleye fillets anyway from Mobridge. Can’t seem to get the pictures out of my mailbox, troubling!

here’s the pics, two from Bitter of the perch we caught, and the group is at the Mobridge Chamber fishing tourney rules meeting. You can see stacked on stage the stuff they give away, as usual I was lucky and won a hat!

Just spent two days on Bitter …Jan 14-15… Got our limits of perch both days, but really had to use the skills to pick them up Tuesday. We found them in about 20fow, kind of just cruising through, and you had to be ready, or you could miss them entirely. A fun trip, but I did notice that the seat was much more comfortable when the fish were biting!

Sounds like great trips to me. I’ve got another work trip planned out there in early Feb. Might have to put gas in the auger this winter yet.

Thinking of heading up there on Saturday… Anyone been there lately? Wondering about any bad heaves and what the fish are doing? PM if you would like. Thanks in advance.

Fishing was good not great btw. 22 perch, 4 eyes and 2 gators for 2 of us

our window was Sunday, with the cruddy weather we decided to put it off to another weekend

Thanks for the report. Heading up that way this weekend. Hopefully we can locate them. Thanks!

Fished Bitter Saturday, Sunday and the first 3 hours Monday morning and did pretty well on nice perch…. This was only my second time ever fishing Bitter and I thought my buddy and I did pretty well for not knowing that body of water well. The first morning we struggled and did not put a perch on the ice until at least 10 am and we started fishing at 630 am. lol I would not say that the perch were on fire but just as all the reports were telling…. when they come through be ready and be quick and you can pop 5 or 6 in just a matter of minutes and I’d say 95% of them are keeper sized fish. The two of us only caught 6 perch total that were small. What a great perch fishery! We ended up bringing back 45 perch between us and all were from 11-14″ fish…. Only 1 was right at 14″ that I caught on the last morning first thing before we left to head back to Lincoln…. Most all of our fish came in 23′ of water, my buddy used a buckshot rattle spoon all weekend and I caught all my perch on a perch colored go-devil in glow tipped with minnow heads… Only a couple came on waxworms when they got finicky midday and they wanted small baits just sitting idle. Make sure to have plenty of minnows because the 4-12″ walleye will not leave you alone ever…. I suspect we caught probably close to 100 between us. We didn’t target the bigger walleye this trip as most of them were being caught in shallow water…. 8-14′ and we were after jumbo perch this trip and they seemed to be all deeper. We also got a few nice perch in 30′ of water one morning as well…. Approx. 22″ of ice and pretty much from what we saw the whole lake was drivable by full size truck. Best bite for us was from 630 am to about 930 and then again from about 330 until 530. From the sounds of it Waubay was putting out some good perch as well as we saw some guys at our motel cleaning quite a few nice fish from there as well… I would say the size of their fish were about the same as ours from bitter…. maybe just a tad smaller average but not much. Neither of us ever hooked into a pike that we know of which I thought was kind of weird since it seemed everyone we talked to was running into lots of them. I would really like to get back up there 1 more time before iceout…

Layne Monroe

Last year I got broke off on a tip up by a fish on the hook set using a small red hook with the paint coming off. This happened at about 9 am. The next day about 400 yards from where I got broke off… I had another flag using the same set up… small red hook with a small red hook…
After the hook set it was clearly not a jumbo perch. After a short fight I landed about a 25in northern, and lookee there… a small red hook with the paint coming off neatly buried in the corner of his mouth in addition to the one that I just landed him with. Not terribly unusual except for it was about 30 hrs later, and there are SO many fish in that lake plus it’s like 15,000 acres…
Now if I could just catch the one that is dragging around my pole…