trailside…..
i have been coming to mille lacs for a few years and i get an OBSCENE amount of bait while i am there. I called nearly every bait store on the south side of the lake and was met with rudeness or people acting like i was insane. Trailside called a bait dealer….got my bait for me in advance and kept it reserved over a 3 day period so i could pick up fresh bait every morning. I had people from 3 other bait stores litterally laugh at me when i asked them to do the same. Trailside wins regardless of the rates for simply caring.

3 boats, 2 dudes per boat….10 dozen per boat per day….i buy it at the same place every year now and have done it 3 years in a row. yes, i spend $1000 dollars on bait in 3.5 days of fishing for 6 guys.

I use so much live bait when i hit mille in the fall that i have to preorder it a couple weeks in advance to avoid buying out every bait store around the lake.

A few years ago i just showed up and figured it was normal to need 90 dozen live baits in 4 days….nope….and if you want to find a great way to make people mad…buy all the bait at every bait shop within 30 miles. Whoops….i don’t do that anymore.

Heading up Wednesday…pumped for the fall smallie bite

I am interested in seeing what comes out of this…I have very little faith in much of anything they do at this point because of my perspective on the walleye. They said there wouldn’t be a need to enact quotas this year…then they enacted quotas and banned live bait fishing for them. Its funny how negative i am about the tribes involvement in this stuff. Maybe i just feel like nobody anywhere should have privileges over anyone else creating unfair advantages towards any group. But what do i know.

ya, i found out i can only have 12 dozen minnows at a time without a bait dealers license, so i am going to have each vehicle stop and get their own minnows. And beyond that i found that the only way you can transport minnows onto a lake is to use a seperate baitwell in the truck, you can’t use your live well with water not from the lake. I basically have to use a remote baitwell and keep the boat baitwell empty until i get it in the lake, fill the livewell on the boat, transfer the sucker minnows to the boat…without the water….to the livewell…So it is official. You guys have the craziest bait rules i have had to deal with out of all the states i have fished.
Besides all that i made some calls to the places you guys recommended and they were all pretty decent to deal with but all of them couldn’t guarantee anything until the week before i get there so i need to call back then. It seemed everyone had sucker minnows right now but the problems are enough nobody would say they definitely could get them then.
thanks for all the advice, appreciated.

just drop shotting on light line, lip hooked, weight on the bottom, bait up about 8 inches. It was nothing special really. As for the sucker minnow, the bigger the better. I went with a friend that i consider a local and when he showed me what to do i was incredibly skeptical, those are some big baits for small mouth. Cost wise, ya, i used 10 dozen a day in my boat over 3 days. got 3 boats for this trip so i just assume we will use the same amount. I am an optimist. basically $100 a day for bait.

I am just chasing smallies. I caught a few large walleye last year if i would get too deep, but i would just reset where i was fishing. It was just amazing to me how predictable what i was catching was related to how deep of water i was in. Walleye are a byproduct fish for me so it isn’t a concern.

Thanks Will, i “will” check them out.

All of my normal bass fishing is with artificials, i like to think of this trip as my live bait trip. I have done well using artificials on Mille Lacs before, but it was insane during the last live bait trip, so that is what i will be doing this trip. After the 50th fish over 5lbs, i was pretty much hooked.