Mille Lacs Crankin’, Corkin’, and Riggin’ June 6-7

The bite has been hot up on Lake Mille Lacs, and it’s no secret. Neither have been the ways in which folks have been putting the most fish in the boat, as fellow IDO reporters Joe Scegura and Brian Gilbertson have noted. In fact, they’ve got it so well-covered, I almost didn’t put up a report. That said, we did run into a few interesting situations over the past two days that might warrant a bit of consideration if you’re heading out to the big pond.

The biggest problem you might have in fishing Mille Lacs right now is deciding which presentation to go with and where, and that’s mostly because just about everything seems to be working with at least reasonable success. We all have our personal preferences, and strong-suits that we fish to, but fish on all ends of the lake, in all types of cover/structure are “on” right now.

With great reports of eaters coming from almost all sides of the lake bobber-fishing at night, we decided to spend Sunday morning going after some bigger fish on the mud and deep gravel. We let the electronics tell us what they could about the fish behavior and location that day, ready to adapt our techniques to whatever was best-practice. With active, though scattered fish in small stretches of some of our best locations, rigging was in order. A small patch of deep gravel/rock topping at 22 feet was our best area that morning, kicking out decent fish in the 21-24″ range with the best fish around 26″. Leader length didn’t seem to matter, nor did color, nor did fishing a floater vs. plain-hook, which is fine when you’re getting bit that well!

The beauty of a lake like Mille Lacs, with Lakemaster having such a great basemap, you’ve got pretty good options for finding areas that are similar in size, shape, and bottom composition. You can also do quite a bit of pre-planning as we did with the Lakemaster Contour Pro software, which was integral to our success. With such a wide array of bites going, our strategy was to be in areas that presented multiple opportunities in terms of range of depths, types of structure, and reasonable presentations per each. So it went on Sun. afternoon, with the sun just peeking through after some showers that we went out to do some more deep rigging before slipping in to do some slip-bobbering on the west side. We found serious pods of fish on the mud, probably some of the best schools I’ve seen on sonar ever, but couldn’t get them to commit on any presentation we tried for an hour and a half. They were obviously feeding on the clouds of fish-flies, caddis, and mayflies that were coming off like mad and easily seen on sonar amidst the schools of fish on the edges of the mud. Rather than wait those fish out towards dark, we headed to some shallower rock for some slip-bobbering amongst the crowds on the reefs. With little action, and few nets out, we decided to try cranking the reefs shallow to see if we could find fish to bobber-on. We never got a chance to cork as the fish were furious in 8-14FOW on JSR-5’s in fire-tiger, along with perch flavored minnow raps. Multiple doubles, and several smallies mixed-in, along with a large toothy critter that was never landed made for a fun, but all-too-short evening. Most of these fish were perfect eaters, around 15-17″es with the occasional dinks and overs.

Monday morning had us fearing a massive hatch on the mud, so we elected to stay away and fish some more rock/gravel, again rigging the scattered fish. Best locations this day included rock humps that topped out at 12-18FOW, with most fish being up towards top early and slipping off throughout the day. This day, the fish definitely showed a preference, especially as the sun got higher in the sky. Leeches on pink hooks with chart. beads on an 8-10 foot leader was the ticket, with other combinations, especially on 6 foot or so leaders not getting bit at all. Slow death worm rigging worked well early but that bite fell apart as the morning went on. Be prepared to deal with perch up shallow, but take advantage of some of the jumbos mixed-in as we caught a few, with a fat 12″er being the best. All-in-all, a great trip, and I look forward to doing it again soon!

Joel