Lake of the Woods Ice Walleye Report

Normally this time of year I’m getting my river boat ready for the Rainy River run, but since the Rainy bite has yet to really heat up, I opted for a last minute ice fishing trip to Lake of the Woods. As I do before I go on any trip, I try to gather as much info as possible to help me develop a solid game plan. This is where IDO plays a huge part in my success.

The information that gets posted on this site daily from fellow IDOers is priceless. IDO allows me to take a number of anglers’ experiences and use them to my advantage. Reports good or bad all help us anglers, so please don’t hesitate in posting the details of your trips. Each piece of information I was able to obtain off this site aided in my success. I found out ice conditions, what type of structure to target, which baits have been producing fish and the list just goes on.

My crew and I took our snowmobiles and four wheelers out of the Graceton beach access, located just north of Baudette. The ice road was recently closed to half ton vehicles or larger due to a few trucks falling through over the past week. Earlier in the week there was a lot of water on the ice, but we found the water was gone and the ice is now very honeycombed. The majority of the fishermen are within a few miles of the access, and from what I’ve heard, fishing has been slow. Based off of what I learned here on IDO, my plan was to head out to some main lake structure in hopes of locating some unpressured fish.

After traveling another 10 miles across the jagged icy terrain we arrived at the area we wanted to fish. Not to plug Otter, but we BEAT those houses and they made the rough trip in stride! On the other hand, my buddies “light blue house” needed some reassembling after the trip. The area we decided to fish was a small flat and normally I’d fish the structure itself, but being a cold front had just moved through we opted to search the deep 34’-36’ areas surrounding the flat. It was nearly 12:00, with the wind howling at a pretty good clip by the time we found what we were looking for, Walleye! We were then able to set up the houses and relax. The four of us enjoyed consistent action for the rest of the day and we ended up icing over 100 fish. Granted we caught a number of small sauger mixed in, but we ended up with our limits of both nice walleye and sauger. The walleye were 19”-16”, the sauger were 16”-14” and they all appeared to be very well fed!

The fish definitely needed to be coaxed into biting. Making them chase your lure up 10 feet before they would commit was not uncommon. Situations like this, is where the 12 foot zoom option on the Marcum LX5 really shined. It was great having the exact area I was interested in, zoomed in! We were using a combination of gold/perch colored Lindy Frostees and Rattlin Flyers tipped with minnows. I had one rod rigged up with a Frostee jigging spoon and the other with a Rattlin Flyer. It seemed like when I had a timid fish down there the rattle and slow fall of the Rattlin Flyer was the ticket, but when a fish came in hot it would hammer the Frostee. This one-two punch put one heck of a pile of fish on the ice for us.

The ice should be fine for ATV travel for another couple weeks yet. The fishing is HOT, so if you’re on the fence about whether to hit the Rainy River or the Lake, I’d say it’s a no brainer until the fish start to make their move up the river. Good Luck!