Mid-week action on Mille Lacs – 5 Aug 2009

My schedule allowed for another mid-week trip to Mille Lacs so I was able to spend Wednesday on the lake with Tim and his neighbor Darrel and my two yellow labs Chesney and Zander up on Mille Lacs. For those following the board here the reports haven’t been as numerous but hey it’s Mille Lacs and you can always find some fish to bite!

We had the day to fish so after a quick stop for fuel and lively leeches from Meleen’s BP we had the boat in the water at 8:30 and were off for the day after letting the labs burn up a bit of energy as they were excited to receive the nod and make the trip with us. Forecast for the day was clear skies with light winds and reasonable temps – I don’t know how you can pick two days to go fishing on Mille Lacs approximately a month in advance and have hardly any winds – apparently if you stay away from the weekends where the winds seem to blow!!!

As we were driving out to bobber some deep water structure I was watching my GPS and saw a small hump adjacent to a larger piece of structure with surrounding deep water and slowed down to graph it since it was on our way. Plenty of fish appeared on the graph in the target zone so we motored up wind, dropped the anchor and slid back over them. Out went the bobbers and quickly it was ‘fish on’. A 23″ fish was the first in the boat followed by 9 others over the next 3 hours while we moved around to keep on top of the fish. We ended up with one nice slot, a couple short fish and 4 fish from 18 – 19″ – heartbreakers if you are hungry! We had a light chop that faded away and with that our biters started to be replaced by small perch so it was time to change our presentation up.

We headed in to allow the labs a mandatory bio break and to throw the buoys for Chesney and Zander and grab some lunch to go. As we came off plane into the harbor both labs did their ‘dock dogs’ impressions and launched off the bow of my Ranger and swam to shore and immediately announced they were ready to fetch.

After the short break we headed back out to the basin and started marking fish in a familiar area and deployed the lines and boards just above the fish we were marking. The skies cleared off and wind died and it was flat calm for a bit but there were clouds off to the NW that said this would be short lived. The clouds rolled in and the wind picked up and we had a few spits of rain but did manage to boat two solid fish – one on fireline and the other off lead before it was time to head home and help with the family chores that evening.

Overall another fun day on the water and my labs probably had the best time out of all of us. If you have never seen a fishing lab you would get a kick out of Chesney monitoring the bobber and boards, supervising all casting and catches along with fishing and re-catching out of my livewell! Can’t wait to get back up there.