After a busy couple of months where minor events kept getting in the way (Getting married & preparing for our soon to come first child) I was finally able to find time for the important things in life… Chasing walleyes with my dad and brother on Mille Lacs! Thankfully, in spite of my serious neglect of our relationship over the past few months, Mille Lacs proved to be in a very forgiving mood.
The plan of attack was to troll crankbaits and before even leaving the dock we started in the harbor at Fisher’s Resort where we got a great update from Dean on where they had been finding success over the past few days. Then looking at the wind forecast and noting a stiff SE breeze we planned our trolling runs accordingly to put the wind at our back allowing us to hold a constant speed and keep our planer boards from surging in the waves.
Our first lines hit the water at just before 6 PM with a smorgasbord of different colors and sizes of cranks consisting of a Orange Fire UV Deep Thunderstick, Purple Clown Flash Rapala TD-11 Taildancers, Hot Steel #7 Shad Rap, and a Gold Alburns Scatter Rap Minnow. Less than 5 minutes later the Scatter Minnow rod doubled over and my dad was hooked into a solid 24" walleye. He barely had time to get the rod back out again it doubled over again and my brother grabbed the rod and swung into action. Realizing that this was our deepest line I quickly let out an extra 10′ of line on our Thunderstick rod and lowering it just that extra couple feet immediately triggered another strike. There are often little clues that when pieced together correctly will make a huge difference and on this day one of those clues was that both fish had small leeches attached under their gills meaning they were really hugging the bottom so we reeled in the planer boards and sent our long lines way out to 175′ putting them just barely above bottom and in short order they were also producing.
Being my first time getting out to the basin this year rather than doubling back to fine tune our presentation on the same school of fish we opted to keep moving and cover as much water as possible. We encountered similar results in several areas with leadcore rods running right on the bottom (4 colors of lead [Suffix 832 Advanced] for scatter raps & 3-3.5 colors for TD-11’s & Deep Thundersticks) being the best producers early in the evening then as the sun dropped towards the horizon the fish started to move up in the water column to feed and planer boards set with TD-11s between 110-125′ behind the board began to take over.
Rapala Scatter Minnows were the winner for best lure of the day with Taildancers being a close runner up. This was a very pleasant surprise as with the success that I’ve had previously open-basin trolling if the scatter rap continues to perform at the pace it did on Saturday it could mean putting an extra 8-10 fish in the boat per day!
We ended the evening with around a dozen healthy walleyes and the only negative about our trip was that it only lasted a few hours. It’s only Monday and I already can’t wait to get back up there next weekend… I hope to see some of you up there as well!