Upper Red Lake Fishing Report 1-15-04

Our first trip to Upper Red lake will be one we will never forget. Our annual trip to Lake of the Woods usually is a group of six people. This year it went to 4 then to just myself and my gal Carrie. All I can say, you guys missed out!

We made plans to fish Upper Red on our way to Lake of the Woods. We got to the lake around noon and had lunch at West Wind before heading out to our fish-house. We got set up around 1:30 and it didn’t take long for the perch to start biting. Lots of 8-10 perch kept us busy in the afternoon. Three very large northern pike also gave us a good battle. Two broke off the line and another was so large I could feel the rod was going to break at the handle as I was trying to get it to the hole. I had to hold the rod blank itself and continued to back reel for about 20 minutes until I just about got it to the hole and the line gave way and she was gone. After all that excitement, the Red lake walleyes started to bite around 4pm. Shown in photo two is Carrie with the future of Red lake. After a quick picture,she was put back down the hole. It was one of 8 walleyes we caught with in 1 hour and most were 14-19 inches. The future looks great for Red lake walleyes.

At exactly 4:30pm, we connected with our first Red lake slab crappie. And it was a dandy. We baited up with Demon Glow jigs and crappie minnows along with Scenic Tackle Glow Devils. The Glow Brite with purple dot Demons # 8 tipped with any sized crappie minnow worked well on our bobber rods. The Red Glow Devil # 1/16 tipped with maggots worked on my jig pole. At 5pm, the sun was setting and there was no noise outside and nobody around us. Red lake is pretty quiet during the week and its probably the best time to get up there if you can. At 5:05 pm, chaos broke out.

One after another, the bobber lines were going down and our Vexilar flashers were lit up like a christmas tree. It was like someone just hit the switch. All I could do was reel my fish up and get over to help get carries fish in. You have to kneel down and pull these slabs up from the mouth. The floor of the fish-house was soaked with water and my pants were drenched. I was having so much fun I didn’t even realize I was that wet until we left. The bite was so aggressive, we caught fish without any bait on our hooks. There was a ruler mounted to the floor, our smallest fish measured 12 inches. Our biggest measured 15 inches and we caught 5 of them. The average was 14 1/2. From 5:05pm to 7:30pm the action was nonstop. We probably caught 40 fish and even had to go to just two lines to keep it simple. Our plans were to spend the night on the ice in-case the bite was slow. At 7:45pm we decided to pack it up and head to Lake of the Woods to get on the ice early in the morning. The crappies were still biting strong when we left. Who knows how many more we could have caught had we stayed. We kept a few to eat and I didn’t see the need to sit there all night and wack on those fish. I knew there was someone else coming into that house the next night and I didn’t want those fish to get spooked. I hope they had a great time like we did.