MIlle Lacs Lake Walleye Report 10-1-04

The full moon night trolling bite on Lake Mille Lacs is something this “river rat” looks forward to each and every season! Ever since my first taste of walleye gold 4 years ago on this magnificent body of water, I have had the urge to make it a yearly event. I had high hopes that the Sept full moon would be a good one this year but once upon arrival found things were going to be on the tougher side this go round:(! The water temps were not optimal holding in the lower 60’s for the areas we normally target in this time frame, James and myself soon realized we had our work cut our for us this late Sept full moon phase.

Once realizing a major change was going to have to take place in order for the same patterns and baits to be effective, we put our heads together and came up with a game plan to target resident fish in the shallower water of 4’ to 7’on the inside weed lines located on the North and West sides of the lake. Once fully convinced there were enough fish located in these areas to be caught, the last thing to do was find the best producing bait. We did catch a few fish on the stick baits early on in our pre-fishing but the fish responded much better to a tighter wobbling bait with the warmer water temps we were encountered with. #7 SSR Shad Raps and regular #5 deep divers in the chartreuse/pearl pattern accounted for most of my success. The slight modification that James wrote about increased our catch on the 25” to 28” fish. Maybe we should have thought about keeping that our little secret……….. don’t you think James?

Out of the 9 nights I spent on the big pond this past full moon, I had the great opportunity to share my boat 5 nights with good groups of people. All of my trips saw 15 to 25 fish an outing with at least one fish over the 25” mark on up to 28.5“, a couple of nights we saw 3-4 nice fish in that length range. Except one, I had one really slow night that things just didn’t come together for us to put big numbers of walleye in da boat, but we had a good time despite the slower bite we were encountered with. I guess that’s fishing for ya!

James and I had enough areas pinpointed so both of us didn’t have to work the same spots when running trips. This paid off for both of us, we were pretty sure these areas we were targeting didn’t have an overabundance of fish on them and 2 boats using the same presentation would just set back both of our overall catch rates. The good part about this was ………..I never had to see Holst at all on the nights we were running trips!

James has done a great job of keeping everyone up to speed every couple of days with his findings so I don’t have much to add on to what he has already wrote about. Just want to take this opportunity to thank all of those who shared my boat this past 9 days. I had a great time fishing with all of you and am looking forward to doing it again.

I will be back on the big lake for the October full moon and still have a couple of openings left for that adventure. This will be prime time for this season to get good numbers of big fish. If anyone is interested just shoot me an email or phone call.

Fish on!

Dustin Stewart

In-Depth Angling Pro-Staff

IN-Depth Angling Video Productions

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Moving Waters Guide Coalition

Ph.507-421-2346