The bite on Mille Lacs continues to be excellent. This week I was on the water Wednesday through Friday for the 1st Annual Hunter’s Point Walleye Extravaganza. I teamed up with IDO Member Dan Pfeifer (BigFife), for this one. Wednesday was our only pre-fish day so we decided to fish in our own boats and each cover a bunch of different mudflats. During the MWC, last week Nate Gilkey (GrainBeltEyes) and I only fished mud the entire week. The flats held good numbers of prime slot fish and plenty of big ones, so I figured that would still be the case this week. On Tuesday night, we mapped out the spots we’d each try so off we went on Wednesday. Dan had good action in the morning and my spots produced better in the afternoon, so that made it easy to develop a game plan for Day 1.
On Thursday, we hit Dan’s best 3 or 4 spots first. As we pulled up on the first spot we started marking pods of fish every 50-100 yards. We marked a waypoint on each pod, then setup a backtrolling run zig zagging back over the flat to the pods of fish. Every time we approached a pod we’d get a bite or even a double. In the first 15 minutes, we already had 2 good 16 inch slots in the well so we hoped it would be a good day. We set a 16 inch or better minimum until noon, so we continued on spot #1 for the next hour and a half. We probably boated 15 fish there, with many slots under 16 inches. By 9AM, the action was slowing down, so we decided to head to another spot.
The rest of the day was pretty much the same. We hit a bunch of spots catching fish on most. Once noon rolled around we had 4 in the box, then changed our slot minimum to 15 inches. We got 1 more 15 incher, then hit spot #6 at 2 PM. After about 45 minutes catching several over 17”, we caught two 14 inchers and boxed them as we only had an hour to go. Then we decided to end the day on that spot and boxed another 14 incher for our 8th fish shortly before it was time to go. At least we had a limit and gave ourselves a chance for Day 2. Our Day 1 basket was a 7 fish limit for 7.44 pounds which put us in 26th place out of 64 teams.
On Day 2, we deployed the same game plan as Day 1. The morning was good as we had 4 good slots pulling spinners in the first couple of hours. After that spot died, we went to another. Cruising up the flat we marked a few pods on 2 different stretches and kept circling back over them.
At about 10:30, I got one I figured was a mid 20’s fish, so I told Dan to keep fishing and I’d let him know when it got close for the net. After it got to the surface, I noticed it looked significantly longer than most. As Dan laid it out in the Judge I thought it had a chance and sure enough, the tail just crossed the 29 inch mark! Now we were back in the game, so the goal was to at least get some quality slots the rest of the day to give us a chance for the win. By 12:30, we had 3 more over 16 inch slots in the box, so in we went. We contemplated not keeping one so we could try for another big one and really seal the deal, but in my years of Mille Lacs Tournament fishing I’ve rarely seen a team get 2 over 28, so in we went.
We ended up with 21.65 pounds which was good for 3rd place, as the top 2 teams edged us by about a pound. I’d like congratulate Dale and Bob Luoma who won with 22.85 pounds and 2nd place finishers Mylo Leistkio and Jason Youngquist who just missed winning the tournament with 22.64 pounds. Great job guys! We had big fish for the tournament, but they had the slots dialed in a little better than us. I’d also like to thank Hunter’s Point Resort and the MTT Staff who ran a great tournament. The meal on Thursday night was some of the best Prime Rib I’ve ever had! The full tournament results can be found on the Hunter’s Point Website or by this link:
http://www.hunterspointresort.com/Events.html
As for tactics, we’ve used Jolly Roger Tackle 100% the last 2 weeks in both the MWC and Hunters Extravaganza. 95% of the time was spent pulling 10 foot Jolly Roger Harnesses with Baby Walleye, Seyka Perch, Pink Scale, Firetiger and Clown as the best colors this week. We’ve also been running a mix of air injected crawlers and Rainbow Chubs for bait. For the Minnows, we just clip the 2nd hook and hook the minnow through the mouth. At times, it doesn’t seem to matter, but other times, Minnows outperformed crawlers and vice versa. Blade size didn’t seem to matter. I usually run #3 blades on Mille Lacs, but during the last 2 weeks we tried #4 and #5 blades for bigger fish and still caught good slots on them as well. 5% of the time was spent leadcore trolling with a few of the prototype Jolly Roger Custom Shad Raps that will be online in the next couple of weeks. The leadcore/shad rap program produced some great fish at times, but hasn’t quite heated up yet as spinners are dominating right now, but it will take off here as summer progresses.
I’ll be off the water for awhile now as it’s my daughter Layla’s 5th birthday next weekend but will back after that so I’ll post a report in a couple weeks when I return to the water.
Best of Fishing,
Shawn Flemming
Jolly Roger Tackle
Great report Shawn and Big Cograts to you and Dan on your 3rd place finish!
Moving 23 spots on day two is something to be proud of! 
The other Hot Harness Patterns.
Another shot of the 29 after we got in.
Another Mille Lacs monster walleye caught this week by the Leisure Outdoor Adventure Guides on Mille Lacs that fell victim to a Baby Walleye Harness.
Nice meeting you Shawn! Way to go on day 2. Suicide fish on Friday
Great job guys!
Many congrats Shawn. Your results speak for themselves, and it’s great to hear about the tactics that took you there. So often I see guys troll spinners like they were headed off for the sun, determined to simply keep baits in the water until something bit. Great to see your approach of marking pods of active fish and precision fishing them. Thanks for the color suggestions too, I plan on pulling spinners this week into next.
I saw you were mixing minnows into the equation during the tournament. Have you had much success in fishing larger chubs with your spinners? Do you clip a hook and just take it up a few sizes?
Thanks,
Joel
Congrats Shawn & Dan. I’ll have to make room on my noodles
for a few more of those harnesses
Thanks again Shawn!
Two things that I noticed last weekend:
The bite on Mille Lacs is great right now. I have no doubts that anyone could pick their favorite technique and go out and catch fish doing it. Since I wasn’t running the boat for a change I had a lot more time to watch how some of the other boats were doing nearby. For the most part, we were outfishing the other boats around us. The reason being is we were staying in the areas of the flat that were holding the highest concentration of fish, the speed was perfect, and Shawn had dialed in on a few blade patterns that were working the best so we stuck with them. It was funny on Friday I watched a guy backtroll right next to us while rigging and we caught 3 or 4 fish on the pass and he had zero. We went back to troll back up the edge and he followed us again but this time switched to a spinner. We caught another 3 or 4 the next pass and as we reeled up the guy got a good look at the harness I had tied on. I watched him quick reel up and change out his harness. For the next hour, he continued to work the same area with us only this time he was catching fish. I’m sure he was marking all of the fish we were, after following us he had the speed dialed, and once he saw the beads and blades he had the last piece of the puzzle to start catching fish.
The other big thing I noticed about pulling spinner blades is that it is putting more keeper sized fish in the boat than other presentations. I’ve been reading on many fishing forums that people are catching a lot of fish, but nothing they can keep. On Wednesday of prefishing, I had a 50% ratio of fish under 17 inches. During the tournament, it was probably more like 30% fish we could keep compared to bigger fish but still a lot better than reports I have been hearing. Don’t get me wrong, spinners will also put big fish in the boat as proven by Shawn’s 29 incher, the 27 ¾” fish we had Thursday, and a handful of 26-27” fish we had over those 2 days.
Congrats to you too Dan! Great to see IDO being well-represented out there.
Nice observations too, especially on the follow boat and the importance of colors. Amazing how well those fish can see down there. We dropped a camera at the end of last winter in 28 FOW on a cloudy day, absolutely amazed at the amount of light and color definition down there. Pair that with fish that see a fair amount of offerings compared to your average walleye, and I think colors play a bigger role than ever.
Congrats again!
Joel
Congratulations Shawn and Dan!
X2
Great Job Shawn and Dan!! Way to find that over. Congratulations!!!!
Thanks Joel and everyone else for the kind words,
As for fishing minnows, I’ve just been clipping the 2nd hook off a crawler rig and hooking them through the mouth on a #4 Gamakatsu Octupus. I know alot of guys use Aberdeen Hooks for minnows, but the Octopus hooks have worked great too. Nice action with the minnow and haven’t had any issues with hookup %. I haven’t tried bigger minnows as I’ve just been sticking with the smaller Rainbows. I think the Chartreuse belly on them might have something to do with it as well. I usally run them with a #3 Seyka Perch, Clown, Electric Perch or Firebelly Blade.
Thanks Again,
Shawn Flemming
I was up fishing the pond and did really well on spinners over the weekend. All on the vmc hydroflows. After seeing your report i instantly hopped on your website and bought some harnesses and cant wait to use them next weekend!
Thanks MILLELACSEYE51,
Thanks for the order. Your harnesses shipped this morning. Good Luck with them and if you have any questions, shoot me a PM.
Best of Fishing,
These reports are great !!!
I have never been in a situation to put a blade bite together and I am really looking forward to putting the JR blades to work…
Shawn,
I see the JR harnesses are 10′. What’s your technique for presenting these long harnesses out on the mud flats. My experience is with 3-6′ harnesses, do you need to do anything different with the extra length?
Joe
Hi Joe,
No extra equipment is necessary for the 10 foot snells. It does help to have a bit longer rod to aid in landing the fish. I use 7 foot Fenwick HMG Medium Heavy casting rods and pull the spinners with a 2 OZ bottom bouncer most of the time.
You can simply trim the snell to whatever length you want, but we have found the longer ones to work best not only on clear lakes like Mille Lacs, but in just about any other body of water as well. In a tournament on Winnie last year, I started out with 5 footers, but after a slow bite, changed to 10 footers and it was game on! The Leisure Outdoor Adventure guides started using Jolly Roger Spinners this year as well and have been hammering fish from the Brainerd Area all the way up to Bemidji and Leech using the 10 footers too.
Hope that helps
Best of Fishing