Longville, MN Area Fishing Report

Our annual vacation to the Longville, MN area wasn’t anything as expected. After two years of getting cold, rain, and overall nasty weather, we were greeted with highs in the mid to upper 70’s, and some very calm and wind-less weather. Too wind-less. Being a fisherman or a farmer, there’s always something weather-related to complain about. I do so mostly in-jest, as we had a great time, caught plenty of fish, and learned a lot more about our home-lake that we spend time fishing on up there. The kids were treated to some fast panfish action along with a few bass one day we ventured to another lake, and the “grown-ups” had a chance to fish walleyes in the early morning when the high-sun didn’t penetrate the depths and shut down the fishing. Or was it the bugs?

Every day as the sun fired up all the way till dark there was quite the prolific hatch going on. The locals were calling them fish-flies, but I’ve seen just about every type of hatching insect called “fish-flies” at one time or another. What’s clear is that the walleyes were gorging themselves on them. A handful of fish stored in the livewell for any prolonged period of time saw my intake filter absolutely clogged with these pencil-lead sized, “S”-shaped larvae. Walleyes would literally dump hundreds, perhaps a thousand or more of these bugs into the well. Upon seeing these fish suspend and even surface in the mornings, yep, you heard me right, surface, we altered our typical rigging with some floaters that did up our success a bit. It took actually seeing a 17” or so eye try to steal a crawler that was literally inches below the surface to believe what we were seeing. With the fly-rods at home, we tried cranking, corking, jigging, but not much else seemed to produce these fish. However, we could see suspended fish drop down on the graph to check out our offerings a few feet off of bottom.

I ended up finding a few new areas, just out of dumb luck. I’m pretty fortunate to have had a top notch marine mechanic and angler in Tim Schwartz from H2Outfitters rig my electronics and position the ducers on my current boat. After some tweaking, and adjusting the sensitivity, I can get a good bottom reading, even hardness, at some pretty high rates of speed. Having that advantage has helped me find numerous prime locations over the years, including some of our better rockpiles and gravel humps from this past trip. Our best location was an off-the-map gravel hump no bigger than a truck which had eyes on it at all times of the day. Getting them to bite at all times of the day was more difficult, but the morning hours definitely saw them roaming the edges of the mud that surrounded them, looking for larvae which appeared to be everywhere.

Most fish were in the 15-17" range, with the big eye of the trip taping at 21”es, almost identical to last year. Eventually, with some more time I’d like to rig some chubs and also possibly take on the open-basin bite, but in getting my chance to play week-long “guide” family….their patience comes in small doses, even then, infrequently. They were happy to have a big fish-fry, and even take home a few that we didn’t release. There was no real color, hook, or bead style preference, as long as it was presented slowly. Some of our bites came on inside rods during our turns, clueing us in on the fact that they want it in their face a bit longer. I didn’t succeed in getting Isaac a walleye, but he reeled in a few for me, and reeled in a few bass as well. All around, a great way to spend the end of the summer, I look forward to it every year.

Joel