Northwest Angle – Canada LOTW

Another great trip into the islands on Lake of the Woods is in the books! Fishing was again stellar, with no shortage of fish!

This trip wasn’t the producer for giants like it had been in the previous 2 years but there were no shortage of fish around the 25″ mark. We spend the majority of the time on the Canadian side around the West side of Falcon Island. The magic depths were between 18-22′, where you could get numbers and big fish. Shallower than that was very slow with the majority of the fish being smaller.

Little Traverse and the Garden areas were slow as molasses. It just didn’t seem like there were many fish in the Little Traverse area, while Garden we marked a ton of fish, they just wouldn’t eat. It looked like a lot of the charters were running up to Starren and Knight & Bridges, but they weren’t catching much, at least on Starren. We spent about half a day on that and left for more productive waters.

No surprise vertical jigging was our best presentation with a 1/4 oz short shank hammerhead jig with a full crawler and stinger. You wouldn’t get bit nearly as often with a half crawler, and you’d get to rebait about 75% of the time without a stinger. Parrot and Chartreuse/Lime green were the two best colors for me, but it seemed to make little different barring a few areas where Parrot was the color to have.  Rigging some of the areas where we were marking a lot of fish but couldn’t catch them, with a slow death/crawler combo worked quite well.

Fished some of the shallow sand around Flag Island but that bite has definitely passed us by.

Water temps fluctuated around 60-65 degrees in the main lake areas with the shallows pushing 70 degrees.

We spent one day having a friendly little fishing contest, where the morning consisted of fishing three different locations for an hour, and the five biggest weighed fish won! The biggest weight for the 3 boats went 22lbs for 3 hours worth of fishing.

The second half consisted of everybody fishing for things like 1st fish, biggest fish, 5th fish, most species and a slough of other categories. The catch was all 7 guys had to fish out of 1 boat! Now that was a fun time and kind of a gong show!

It all came down to the last event, a game of Ship, Captain and Crew at the local watering hole, and my dad had the hot hand taking the win!

It’s always a fun time, with a bunch of characters to say the least!