After spending some quality time with friends and family over the past couple weeks I was really looking forward to a getting back up to Mille Lacs one last time for some late season hard water trolling! Joined by my good friend Mike Clarke we decided our gameplan was to hit the mud and keep moving until we found fish. Since one of the keys to getting on fish this time of year is being mobile we made a few modifications to the ATV… With just a couple ratchet straps, an extra ram mount ball, and my extra flasher battery we had the perfect ice trolling machine!
We started out by hitting one of our big fish flats and in order to get as many lines in the water as possible for the sunrise bite we added a couple tip-ups… Before I even had the second tip-up out the first flag was up and we had our 1st fish of the day, a fat 14" ‘eye and I knew it was going to be a good day! Over the next couple hours we iced 5 more walters, a jumbo perch, and a few tullies. Then as quickly as it had started the wind kicked up, some clouds moved in, and our bite was gone so we decided it was time to start trolling.
Over the next several hours we continued to cover water hitting some of our favorite summer spots on various flats. Over the course of the day we found that the fish were primarily sitting right on the bottom edge of each flat in 30-35′ (depending on the flat) and that typically we would pick up 1 or 2 fish in each spot but once the active fish had been caught it wasn’t worth sticking around. A tip that really helped us put fish on the ice was to jig aggressively by pulling our spoons up as fast and as high as we could with single sweep of the rod to bring fish in and then barely twitching it a few inches above them to trigger a bite… This worked extremely well for Mikey as he was trying his new 43" "Northern Tamer" for the first time and absolutely loved it (One more thing to add to my wish list) We also found that the simple modification of adding a little extra color by putting a small flasher on everything from a buckshot to a slender spoon probably doubled our catch rate.
If it’s any indication how good the fishing has been on Mille Lacs this year, we ended Friday with a limit of ‘Eyes and several jumbo perch AND I was actually still a little disappointed that we hadn’t done better! On Saturday we were joined by a few other friends with the same results… What a year it’s been on the pond!!!