Fished south of Lions on Friday. Only a single smallmouth was caught. In looking back at notes from last year, the conditions for flow and height, pretty similar, with 3 degrees warmer last year. Last year on the same locations a 40 fish day.
Are the docks in at 494 and Lions Levee?
Upnorth85, you sure come on this site whenever you think it is beneficial to tout the natives, sorry but I am going to call you out on these comments.
“Of course I’m biased, but I would go as far as to say that the tribes wrote this plan that is obviously beneficial to the state. The tribes proposed the specifics of this plan.”
I have been involved in discussions on ML for a lot longer than you have. While I am not allowed to attend the FTC Meetings, the DNR does provide me with the presentation materials and notes from the discussions. I attend all the MLFAC Meetings and although I applied to be one of the MLFAC members, after I inquired why I was not chosen, someone with direct knowledge in the DNR informed that those making the decisions on members thought there was someone more qualified in my lane, old white guy.
The DNR provides me with their modeling data, their creel survey data, LL Surveys, and any other data I ask for.
I was also provided an advance copy of the 5-year plan for review and input. My reply, it looks like the natives wrote this. The response back was the natives had input about what went into the plan.
Just FYI, before any notes can be published by the DNR, first the notes have to go to the natives for their input and updates. That is why it takes months for the notes from the FTC and MLFAC meetings to get added to the DNR Mille Lacs Web Page. The notes from the last 2 FTC meetings are still not up.
I was also the person who found the net that had been left out of CC Access and took the picture that was put on TV in the metro. I was also provided with DNR Report on this issue and the corrective actions the natives took and the folks responsible for leaving the net.
Now to your comments: For at least the past five years I have been pushing the DNR for three things. 1) A three-year plan, 2) Allow an overage as the science support this, 3) stop with the conservative shutdowns.
The DNR’s repeated responses, year after year, the natives will not allow a multi-year plan, the natives will not allow an overage, Parson’s comment that the DNR sets the goal at 50% of our allotment “so that he can sleep at night.”
The real reason there is a change here is that the DNR was pretty much backed into a corner during last Oct MLFAC meeting over the fiasco from last summer. The amount of heat on the DNR at the meeting left Parson scrambling for cover. He was forced to agree to visit Tutt’s Bait in Garrison and listen to their customer’s feedback on lake management, and went out with Tony Roach for a day on the water to get a real feel for how many fish and forage was in the lake.
One last comment, it was told to me personally by someone very involved from the DNR side in the FTC meetings, that science does not drive the decisions coming out of FTC and managing the lake.
I can’t stop, apparently the natives now want to be able to spear muskies and thus are now in support of starting to stock muskies again.
I also attend the nettings at CC each year as from my lake viewpoint, I can see all the nets set out from Doe Island. From my perspective, the netting is handled very well. I also don’t have a beef with the netting, my beef has been with the DNR being forced to take a conservative approach to management because of the natives. If you’re there this year, keep an eye out for a black ram pickup. I’ll sometimes strike up a conversation with the native conservation officers.
So yes, in all cases, the longer a fish is out of the water the less chance it has to survive. Even with the quick release back into the water, didn’t Aaron’s video show that all five of the fish would have probably died with out adding the weights and the attention to detail of the release? With the DNR and Aaron’s study, both just show that pulling crappies from deep water kills most of them.
Also, Aaron while trying to prove his point on barotrauma release, also highlighted the bigger problem, how easy it is to find and catch fish using FFS. They saw a fish at +40 feet and Aaron was able to drop directly on that fish and catch it. Without FFS that fish would not have been caught, there would be less dead fish from barotrauma without FFS.
I am not against this technology, but after attending the recent DNR round table, it doesn’t appear that the DNR has a coordinated approach to looking at the affects of new technology or putting a team together to look at this.
So what am I missing? I basically see no value to this 2nd video. A dead fish is a dead fish. Didn’t all 5 of his fish need special handling to get them to go to the bottom and he needed to adjust his weight to get the proper weight to help the fish survive?
Even then one of the larger ones died immediately and the other larger one needed multiple attempts.
So he pretty much just confirmed what the DNR study showed that pulling crappies from deep water kills most of them. Five fish is a small sample size but 20% died and the other one would have also died if not for his multiple life saving measures. So really 40% died.
Now if he had done what he did in the first video in holding the crappies mouth up to let air escape and then closing the mouth upon release, that is something that folks could do pretty easy. Maybe a follow up doing this.
Netguy, you assume that if you use a heavy enough weight to get the fish to the bottom that they will survive? From his study, didn’t he need to adjust the weight multiple times so that they remained upright, so just the right amount of weight? Who knows how much weight a 2lb or a 3lb walleye requires, and even a different 2lb may require different weight depending on condition.
I really like what he is doing and have been trying to follow him closely for years. His muskie lure creation was hilarious.
I met Dickie a few times.
When we first starting fishing the lake heavily in the summer of 2013, one night we headed out to 3M to bobber fish. Our first fishing on the East Side. There must have been over a 100 boats, not knowing where to start, I just looked at the map and picked a point off the North edge. After getting set up, out comes Dikie’s Launch and circles around us a couple of times and then sets up about 50′ from us. So my thoughts, we kind of landed on his spot. We fished right next to each other for a few summers after that. Once I forgot leaches at the cabin and he gave me some.
A year or so later, I was ice fishing out of Liberty’s and came in for dinner. Dickie also came in and sat next to me at the bar, we had a good long chat about this and that. He commented that he was living in a fish house and that he had gone through with his truck a couple of days before. I thought, oh gosh, your not a young man to go through the ice. It did not seem to have phased him at all.
Just FYI
My Xfinity cable and internet just went up to $214, 4 years ago when I first started using Xfinity it was $141.
So today I called and ended up complaining about the cost increase from 4 years ago with a gentleman from Johannesburg South Africa and I now have a 1 year lock in at $175. I guess it pays to call and threaten!
Hi, we are heading back to Zihua and staying again at the Villa Mexicanna. Anyone been down there recently and have any good fishing experiences to share?
Not sure if 8lb will ever be broken and if the 8lb is legit. I have been fishing ML every summer for smallmouth since 2013 and since 2017, when I took part in the DNR smallmouth study, have recorded all the smallmouth caught from my boat. This year’s total was 442.
I have weighted only two fish that entire time and one this fall was just over 7lb and only one fish has been caught over 22″. So maybe with the warming water trend, smallmouth will get larger over time, but currently I don’t think there is an 8lb out there.
Brent caught that fish the last day of the event. Is so happens that on the down day, I tried to fish the West as some of the bigger bags had been coming from the West side but was blown off so decided to put in at the Red Door and having never fished the area, the owner directed me to a hump. I went back the next day to fish the same hump and to my surprise Brent was sitting on the hump and I watched him catch that fish. There was a lot of excitement in his boat. KVD was fishing in that general area also but of course he was only throwing cranks.
John,
I am ex-carpenter. Here is what I suggest.
1) Put in the soffit chutes and roof vents next summer.
2) Wire as necessary for lights, fan, get the LED lights from Menards.
3) Install a drop down stairs that allows you to pull down the ladder for easy access to the garage ceiling.
4) Install Kraft faced insulation between the ceiling rafters.
5) Staple poly to the ceiling joists.
6) Rent lift and install sheet rock.
The drop down ladder and Kraft faced insulation will allow you to keep the attic storage. You can also probably add some plywood in the attic between the braces to make storage and access easier.
Hi, yes every year since they started on Mille Lacs. Boat 9.
This is a great thread.
I had mentioned in a previous post with the link to the early season bass survey, that I am a new member to the DNR Bass Work Group. During the March meeting, my first to attend, there was a lot of discussion relating to bass tournaments and what steps the work group might suggest to the DNR in regards to the overcrowding at lakes/accesses.
The current effort for this year is to encourage tournament organizers to list their tournaments on an online forum to reduce tournament organizers doubling up on a given lake. The hope is that organizers will police themselves versus the DNR having to take a more active role.
There are three different forums that I am aware of for organizers to list their tournaments. Not sure how this will play out as I think there should be a single forum and maybe sponsored by the DNR as the DNR already has the permitted forum.
https://www.basstl.com/mn-tournaments
http://mglures.com/tourneysearch.php
The next bass work group meeting is in August and all the comments here are good back ground for my input to the work group at this next meeting.
Most people have a cell phone to quickly check the regulations. Season is currently closed state wide to keep a bass. If your nephew does not know the regs he probably shouldn’t be fishing and definitely not contemplaing keeping. A 21″ smallmouth in Mille Lacs is estimated to be 14 years old.
Just order 3x 100ah PowerUrus at $400 each with BT to power Ulterra.
I did a lot of research on batteries and for a budget battery, the tear downs were pretty impressive.
Yes big bummer for the Gopher loss, my son and daughter and law were there and are still crying in their beers.
However it should not have come as a surprise and I was telling anyone who would listen that the Gopher style of play with trying to pass the puck to the blue line and hoping their offensive talent can work their magic was not going to work with Q playing a 1-3-1.
Give Q their credit, they deserved to win. They knocked out Ohio, Michigan, and the Gophers and none of these were fluke wins.
I think they had the number 1 defense, the number 3 offense, and number 2 or 3 goalie. So they deserved to be there and definitely the overall better team.
To me it was a coaching failure for Masko to have that much talent and not have a game plan that his highly skilled team could use to at least make it a close game. I don’t recall the Gopher’s in the 3rd period once having control of the puck in the offense zone 5 on 5. That is the worst beat down I have ever seen in a single period.
I was on Mille Lacs yesterday. No pull back from the edges and no slush along the East edge of the lake.
With the latest ice out in 2013 and in looking at the monthly averages for this year to be a little above 2013, my guess is May 11, also my birth day.
Huge thank you to the Vietnam vets. I used to work with a couple. They never spoke much of their experiences.
I graduated high school in 73 and was pretty fascinated with the war, every day after coming home from high school, the first thing I did was pick up the newspaper and read the daily updates. At that time I was a big supporter and my draft number would have put in service if the war hadn’t ended.
I ended up going into the Air Force anyway and some the Air Force guys had some interesting stories, they really weren’t in danger, lived off base, and had 100’s of naked pictures of their Vietnamese girls. Not like my friends at work.
Just FYI for you veterans. The Take A Vet Fishing comes to Mille Lacs every summer and puts on a huge get together. They will put you up the night before, have a launch fishing the night before, have guided fishing, then lunch and a thank you program. If you want to spend a great day fishing Mille Lacs, find their web site and sign up. They do a fantastic job.
Also one of the main persons involved with the effort is now partial owner at Thorne Bros in case you want to put some thank you business their way.
Well these guys are on cats because they worked for cat. But for you folks that see through red and yellow eyes, no, there is no red or yellow motor that has the longevity of the cat 800. If you think there is, please tell me which one, the poo one with all the bearing issues, the e-tech that blows up all the time?
For those of you involved in student angler organizations, are the organizations pulling permits? On Tuesday, I was at the DNR’s Bass Workgroup meeting and overcrowding of accesses is pretty high on the list of items to tackle. There will be a push to reduce the size of the student angler tournaments and drop the required permit size from 25 boats to something less. Also to get the student organizers to pull permits. The concern is that there are many tournaments that do not pull permits and tournaments show up on the same lake and over crowd the accesses. Note that for every tournament, the organizer is required to alert the local sheriff department.
https://www.dnr.state.mn.us/fishing/tournaments/requirements.html
There is an attempt to get tournament organizers to enter their tournament information in one spot to help with this.
DNR link to permitted tournaments.
Just some food for thought.
During this past Tuesday’s DNR Bass Workgroup, one of the main items to try and address is the tournament situation in regards to the many tournaments leading to problems at the accesses/lakes. Lots of comments about local tourneys not getting permits and multiple tournaments showing up on the same lakes. Discussions about the growth of the student fishing.
A few things discussed.
Trying to create an online registry of fish tournaments. There are a couple of web sites that have been created to try and help track the tournaments. One of the concerns is that many of the local tournaments, including the students, do not pull permits and thus no record of the lakes the tournaments are on.
Links to a couple of tournament directories.
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https://www.basstl.com/mn-tournaments
http://mglures.com/tourneysearch.php
Capping the max number of entries for both adult and youth to 100.
Drop the minimum permitting requirement from 25 to 15 or less.
Have tournament participants put some type of identification on the vehicle to allow for identifying which vehicles are in a tournament.
Link to DNR Tournament permit list.
https://files.dnr.state.mn.us/recreation/fishing/tournaments/2023-dnr-fishing-
tournament-list.pdf?v=2023.01.19-21.29.29
For those of you involved with student fishing, would you mind bringing these items to your tournament organizers and ask them to add their tournaments? The goal from the work group is to try and see if creating a list will help with the overcrowding this summer and if not, then consider changes to propose for next year.
The next work group meeting is targeted for August, your thoughts/comments on any items to bring to the group?
I am also considering Lithiums for 36V Trolling motor, 3x 100Ah. My biggest deciding factor is to go with a cheaper $350 or $800 battery. There are many good tear downs on batteries at this link and if you go over to BBC there are dozens of discussions on Lithium batteries.
https://www.youtube.com/@LithiumSolar/videos
https://www.bbcboards.net/search.php?searchid=27398788
Depending on your current charger, you may be able to have it reprogrammed versus replacing. For my Dual Pro 4x15A, the cost to reprogram is about $180 plus shipping.
If you have a switch in your boat to allow for switching over to one of the trolling motor batteries from starting battery, when going to lithium this is probably going to be a problem as most lithiums can’t be used for cranking.
While I have not seen a bag of poop, what is left behind on ML is pretty disgusting and shows the true lack of respecting the outdoors, by not only some of the fish house owners but also the resorts/ice road owners.
I took my snowmobile, a couple of days after the houses had to be off and drove around the ice roads coming out from Liberty Beach, (Dickies) and the number of wood blocks and garbage left behind was pretty amazing. Even came across a snow shovel that had been broken and just left sticking up in a snowbank.
I’d rather have those responsible for the ice roads be required to pick up after all the houses are off or be fined heavily.
Of course, the next day there was a major dumping of snow so for sure none of that was picked up and will be floating come spring.
Jon, the resort owners were okay with the two week July shutdown. More than once owners commented at the MLFAC Meetings that July shut down is okay and does not hurt their business. For the the first two weeks in July which include the 4th, the shut down apparently did not affect their business as folks are coming anyway.
There was absolutely no reason for the July shutdowns. Even when considering the worst case temperature scenario and best case bite for the first two weeks in July, the modeling showed there was still very little chance to go over the allotment. However the DNR would take worst case temp, worst case catch rate, and target to be at 50% of the allotment.
This all so as Parson’s commented at a MLFAC meeting, so “I can sleep at night and not have to worry about overage.” So the DNR deliberately set the worst case modeling target at 50% of allotment.
I am so excited, when the family and grand kids are up over the 4th, we can finally all go out and bobber fish, watch the 5 little granddaughters play with leaches, and watch the sunset.
Cost per school is $100 for membership, $160 per sport, and $4.60 per student. Plus, in 2020 schools were hit with Covid fee up to $10,000.
We all pay taxes multiple ways to our schools, through the property taxes and from the state to the schools. So yes, my taxes support the MSHSL.
There a big difference between a high school sporting event and a professional team.
So just think, if you were not on the original list of those that were given the opportunity to buy the tickets dirt cheap, you basically have no chance to go. So those who were somehow lucky enough to get the original season tickets, like 30 years ago, have had a monopoly ever since and into the future.
This is a high school event. My taxes and everyone’s else go to support the MNSHSL, but yet don’t have a chance to go to the games.
So back in 2018 when I petitioned the MNSHSL to allow 250 or 500 new tickets a year, I was basically told that the folks from Norther Mn make this a yearly family event and they have no interest in changing this. I was also told that there are a few tickets each year that get returned by the high schools and these go on sale the night of the games at the box office. So I replied, so I live in Rochester and I should make hotel reservations and then go stand outside in the cold and hope I am lucky enough to get one of the few tickets available!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
So am I the only one that has a problem with how hockey tickets are made available for the state high school tournament? I have posted on this a couple of times over the years and no one but myself has commented as there being a problem. Don’t any of you folks care to go the the AA boys championship game or a bunch of you lucky enough to get grandfathered in year after year?
Just a little background. My son played high school hockey back in early 90s and while his team never reached state, each year he was on the team, tickets were made available through the school and we went to the games.
He went off to college and after he graduated we wanted to make it a tradition to go to the games again but could not get tickets.
Then in 2018 I found out that tickets were available to a select group of folks and each year they had the opportunity to get the tickets and give out, sell, etc. as they chose.
Also that year I applied to be on the list and became requestor in waiting at 2174 and 2175. Checked back in 2019 and was still at 2174 and 2175. So that year not a single new ticket owner was awarded.
In 2020, 100 new tickets were added so moved to 2074 and 2075. Checked in the other day and now after six years at 2030 and 2031. So in six years have moved up about 100 places on the list. At his rate I’ll be in my 80’s before I have the opportunity to go to boys AA championship game.
I have tried to get the local news stations to cover this and none of them are willing to check into it.
Anybody have any Class AA tickets to get rid of? I signed up to get on the list 5 years ago and on a couple thousand waiting list have not moved up 10 spots. Meaning all those families that get the ticket package for about a $100 a year and can transfer rights to any relative they want, haven’t been given up any of their tickets. What a bunch of B.S. If your not getting the tickets already, there is no chance that in 20 years you will get tickets.
For the last two sets I have bought within the past year, I watched FF for their sales when they have 3 get one free, and then I request DT to price match and they have. A 4th tire free really lowers the price.
The 20-footer would cost $113, up 151% from $45 is outrageous, a 50% would be more like it and yearly park pass from $35 would rise 29% to $45 is on the low side. But I suppose the DNR feels that those with 20′ boats are pretty much stuck with their boats so they can get away with it while yearly pass increases are a harder sell.
Thanks all for the responses. I’ll check them out.
A couple of years ago I was informed about Dos Hermanos but was never able to hook up with them.
Mwal, I believe we are staying at the same place, Villa Mexicana. Our 2nd time here. Any other things you did that you wish to recommend? Did you make it to Jungle Pizza?
