What a great Father’s Day weekend to be on Mille Lacs. The weather was comfortable, there were no bugs and the fish were biting good! This weekend, we decided to work gravel and see if we could locate some slot fish for the frying pan after experiencing a low slot to fish caught ratio on mud flats the previous week. We were really busy filling orders on Friday, so we left Saturday morning and got on the water at about 10 AM.
Working various gravel bars from the 5 Mile Gravel area down towards Sloppy Joes, we ended up with 7 nice slot fish and many overs up to 26” on Saturday. Several bars were quite crowded with boats hovering over the tops in the 23-25 foot range, so we did a lot of driving around to locate fish on the outer depth rings. Once we found them, we’d setup for a trolling run by pulling spinners with both leeches and crawlers behind a 2 oz bottom bouncer all weekend.
The best colors were our Pro Series Sunrise Craw with a leech and Firebelly or Firetiger with a crawler, all in #3. These were the colors we started with and they were producing so well, we didn’t try much else. It was basically a tie between leeches and crawlers. When fishing gravel, we lower the bouncer to the bottom, and then reel up 2 cranks to keep the weight off the bottom a bit to avoid snags while trolling at 1.0-1.3 MPH.
On Sunday, we put in a half day and worked a few really small humps on the South end. This was a ton of fun because we had them all to ourselves and the fish were loaded on some of them. Most of these humps were maybe an acre in size so we would basically just backtroll the spinners around them in a figure eight as some fish were on top and some on the sides. On one spot, we must have picked up close to a dozen eyes in 1 hour. Again, we experienced a good mix of slot fish and overs.
Next weekend is my daughter’s 4th birthday party, so I won’t be hitting the water again until the 4th of July weekend and will post another report when I return. Good luck to all going out this week and weekend.
Best of Fishing,
Shawn Flemming
Jolly Roger Tackle