With all of the recent advances in the fishing industry leaving many of us with expensive boats and gear it’s often very easy for us as fishermen to take ourselves and our hobby too seriously and forget to just have fun. So what happens when Mother Nature throws you a curveball and leaves your favorite lake more than 90% covered in ice? Well for our group instead of spending our usual serious opener pulling all night trolling sessions we spent it rekindling our childhood fishing techniques and it turned into an awesome weekend of unconventional fishing!
Faced with 25-30 mph winds and uncertain ice conditions for Saturday morning we decided not to fight the weather and instead hit some of the local Malmo area creeks chasing pike, walleyes, and even rough fish. As it turns out I had forgotten how much fun there is to be had this time of year without even launching a boat. In fact it was such a good time that it was after 6 PM before my boat even left the garage.
Finally, after a quick barbeque we headed over to Mille Lacs and upon arriving at Barnevelds Resort on the North end we found several hundred yards of open water and hardly another boat in sight. The first thing we noticed pulling out of the harbor was the water clarity as without any wave action to stir the water we could easily see bottom in up to 8 FOW and were even able to see several walleyes just as we idled out of the harbor. Next was the water temperature which was aleady 40 degrees?! With the ice pushing us off of our normal routine the first step of the evening, before we even wetting a line, was to put the HDS to good use and do a bit of quick scouting. After finding a few shallow transition areas where the bottom changes from rock to gravel/sand we went to work pulling crankbaits starting with 3 different types/colors. We quickly started to find a pattern and in no more than 15 minutes we had our first fish in the boat, a healthy 19″ walleye, on a blue/silver #7 SSR Shad Rap. After another quick strike on the same line we switched another rod over to a brand new jointed SSR and in short order had our 2nd and 3rd ‘eye in the boat. We ended the night with 7 ‘eyes (a couple of would be box fish that we released) with only 1 or 2 that I think might have been females.
It turns out we had so much fun on Saturday that we decided for pretty much an exact do over again on Sunday. The only difference was that the weather was nicer, we caught bigger pike, and we ended up with 8 walleyes instead of 7. What we found over the course of our 2 evenings on Mille Lacs was that mostly male fish are present as most likely the females are still in spawning mode and have yet to put the feed bag on. Typical size was from 18-24” with about 1/3 of our fish being keepers. The smallmouth were also present and actually started to go pretty well on Sunday when we found water temps as high as 42.
With and warm weather early this week I’m still hopeful the ice will be gone by this weekend and the fishing should only get better. Good luck and good fishing everyone!