Leech Lake Walleye Report May 17th and 18th

I’ve been hearing nothing but great reports from Leech Lake, so it was music to my ears when I got the call from my buddies Travis and Nathan late Sunday to go fishing. Where oh where do we go? It didn’t take me long to talk them into going up to Leech. We packed up our gear and were on the road in a short order. The plan was to fish Sunday night and Monday.

Well it was around 7:00pm once we found ourselves on the water and there were only about 10 boats in the area I decided to start. It didn’t take but a few minutes and we landed a fat 16” fish. The other boats didn’t seem to be catching much of anything, but the only difference I could see is we were not drifting as fast. I used the tiller most of the trip to keep our speed much slower than the others. We were using shiners either on a lindy or a jig. Then we caught another and another and then a few of the other boats joined in as the bite continued to increase over the next couple hours. We had some small fish mixed in but picked up around 20 eaters 14”-18” with a handful of fish over 20”. Including a fat 24 ½”er. We found that a shiner/jig presentation worked slow out produced the lindy hands down and the fish were MUCH nicer. We concentrated on 10-13 FOW near any of the windblown points. As the evening came to an end we headed back to camp in great anticipation of what was most certainly going to be a great fish fry.

As my buddies worked on cleaning fish and starting a fire, I walked over to our camping neighbor across the path and asked em how fishing has been. He said they’ve been here since opener and the bite was outstanding the first three days but the cold front last Wed really shut em down. He said today they fished an area with over 60 boats on it for nearly two hours without seeing a net. He said the bite has been very slow the last few days. After hearing this I either thought we hit the mother load or there’s a really slow day bite? Well it turned out to be a little of both.

The next morning we hit the water and the bite was ok until about noon before the bite went dead. We fished the rest of the afternoon jumping from place to place, but only boating around 10 more fish. Then 7:00 finally rolled around and the bite picked up and picked up until the walleye were almost catching it on the way down. Just in the evening alone we boated around 50 walleye with many in the 16”-18” range. We also had a handful of over 20” fish again, including a 25 ¾” beauty my buddy Nathan caught. It’s always good to end a trip on someone’s personal best! Great job buddy!