This past weekend I had the opportunity to fish the AIM Weekend Series tournament on my home waters of Mille Lacs. First off I want to hand it to everyone at AIM, especially their tournament director Jim Miller, as it was a very exciting and well run tournament. A big kudos is also due to the folks up at Red Door for their hospitality and first rate facilities that helped make the tournament a success.
For anyone who is not familiar with the AIM series it uses a unique CRR (Catch Record Release) format that allows tournaments to be held without being restricted by the slot regulations that are becoming so common. It is an awesome format and is definitely the way of the future… And the best part is no fish were taken out of the lake!
In preparation for the tournament my partner and I decided that to split up on Friday and he would fish the mud/gravel areas, both rigging and pulling blades, while I would spend my day giving my trolling rods a workout by pulling crankbaits around the mud flats and searching for fish in the open basin. Surface temps had jumped to 68 degrees and fish were transitioning to mid-lake structure so the past few weeks the fishing had been pretty slow.
Both my partner and I found the early signs of a good bite with quite a few more fish relating to the mid-lake mud flats than in the basin but the school I found in the basin were all 25-28″ fish and we made the decision to focus on the open basin bite… As he put it, for a one day tournament there was no need to play it safe and knowing that many if not most of the other competitors would be focused on the mud we decided to try our luck in the open basin.
Unfortunately on Friday night a cold front came through and when we hit the water Saturday the surface temps had dropped from 68-59 degrees and the fish I had found feeding off the bottom on Friday were now pushed back down into the mud. We only managed to get one 25″ fish to go and even her belly was covered with 3 small leeches indicating that she too had been hugging bottom.
After our set-back on Saturday we decided to spend our morning fishing the mud hoping to put our 5 fish on the board and then head to the basin the hopes of upgrading… The fish however had other plans. By 11:00 we had only boated a 24″ and 25″ with a couple other nice ones that came unglued and we were in full on scramble mode. We probably could have stuck it out on the mud and got our tourney limit of 5 fish, but we figured that would leave us middle of the pack at best and decided to go for the hail-Mary by heading back out to the basin… But it was not to be and we ended up weighing only 2 fish.
The water temps were back up to 62 degrees by Sunday and as you can see from the tournament weights the bite on the mud flats is starting to get very good. Based on what I saw we were only 1 maybe 2 weeks away from the mid-lake crankbait bite taking off, which usually kicks in when the water temps get to around 65 degrees. Another interesting bit of information that I heard from talking with other competitors was that quite keeper sized fish and even ones under the slot were caught which is very encouraging to hear. Several other IDO members also fished the event and did much better that we did so maybe they can speak to what they saw as well.
Overall it was a great tournament and I can’t wait to fish it again if they come back next year or even on one of the remaining tournaments this year on Pools 2/3 in June or Leech Lake in July.