Great Bite on Mille Lacs Lake

Jack with a beautiful Walleye

Well, after over a month in the shop, the Ranger was finally ready for it's maiden voyage, the first of the year, to Mille Lacs Lake.  Because of the current political situation, the ability to keep any walleyes ended on June 1, therefore it is strictly catch and release on the lake.  These last few years of let's just call them, restrictions, have resulted in a huge population of large fish over 22 inches in the lake and they are hungry!   Monday I was joined by 2 retired electrician friends, Jack Taylor and Pete Mlinar with the goal of confirming if the great bite was still on. After meeting near Elk River we headed north.  In the past it would be pretty easy, we would stop at my friend Bill Lundeen's Tackle Castle and load up on all that was needed, however since he retired from the business and the shop remains closed, we had to do something I haven't done in over 30 years, buy bait somewhere's else, this time it was Prince's Bait just north of Milaca,  getting only 2 dozen Jumbo Leeches and 3 dozen crawlers, we felt that we were stocked up pretty good....little did we know!  Arriving at the old Cash's Landing things continued to plague each outing with the boat as when it came off the trailer something happened and it ripped the side cover from the front trolling motor.  Only cosmetic yet another thing to fix.   With a howling south wind, previous suggestions stated to simply head out to 7 Mile Flat right away.  Anyone knowing me is aware that I really like Sherman's flat and one has to drive over it to get to 7 mile.  OK boy's, let just check this out!  We were marking fish like crazy so naturally we had to stop!  With 3 in the boat and the fact is that I still haven't gotten that proficient in the proper boat control for following a break in 2 foot waves, I decided to simply input a route on my chart screen then tell the

It was bigger than it looks!

trolling motor to follow it.  It works pretty slick as we followed the break to the end of the route then reversed it.  It was easy to do because there wasn't anyone in our way.  Pulling crawler harnesses we were able to land 6 walleyes, all over 22 inches.  With the wind ever so growing stronger it was time to head to 7 mile where we could directly drift and edge by simply letting the wind power us and then use the trolling motor for the finer points of steering.  As we came by this fully wrapped Ranger with a single guy, we watched him land 2 fish as we slowly passed.  To us it looked like a tournament guy pre-fishing for an upcoming event and was just trying to establish a pattern as he didn't stay long.  Well, it didn't take us long to see what the deal was about that spot.  Immediately we were marking fish and a lot of them.  Enough to drop the trolling motor, engage the anchor mode and get out our slip bobber rods.  Sitting in the same spot for 3 hours, we went through the 2 dozen leeches, catching at least one walleye a leech and sometimes 2.  Exhausting all of our leeches, we decided to go exploring a little and headed for a similar spot on 9 Mile Flat.  With no leeches we simply hung a full crawler on our hook and caught another 4 walleyes.  By 4:00 the wind had begun to take it's toll so suggesting we long line troll the top of the flat with deep diving baits and lead core line.  The experience of using the kicker motor as the main source of power while using the main motor as a steering keel worked pretty well as I used my iTroll system to dial in the speed (2 mph) and my big motor to keep us straight.  The problem is that doing this in 2 foot waves takes a lot of effort and after 2 passes and nothing to show for it it was time to head back.  if the water would have been calmer it would be easier to assess where your baits were running.  This is something that we'll have to try later this month as it can be a lot of fun for sure.

Walleyes on the bottom

One forgets how much of a beating one takes when it's windy like that.  Getting older doesn't help it either!  The one thing that this trip showed is the importance of understanding your electronics as we had fish on the screen constantly.  I would shout to the guys, the walleyes are right under us and like clockwork, they would drop their bobbers next to the boat and withing seconds it would be down and a quick set of the hook and we were reeling up walleyes, for a total of 30. The picture on the left says it all as you can clearly see the fish hanging just off the bottom in 25 feet of water. The system in the boat allows me to scroll back in time to a group of marks like this, put the cursor on those fish then tell the trolling motor to go to that spot, it starts the autopilot and takes you right back to there and goes into anchor mode the minute it arrives.  In some of those spots one can see 5 or 6 fish stacked up.  As stated, while on Sherman's it was decided to try and pull spinner rigs up the "Cut".  Rather than struggle with boat control I simply engaged the route function then plotted a route on the screen before saving it and engaging.  Pretty slick as the trolling motor followed the route marked on the screen and once finished you could reverse it.  What was interesting is like on fishing opener, the Lowrance kept warning that it was running out of memory and I needed to delete something.  Not unlike at Leech I spent a lot of time searching duplicate way points, non critical routes and deleting them then purging the memory. Everything I did seemed to only free up small amounts of memory as way points take little space, there was still only about 2 mb of memory left.  This trip I had noticed on the warning to try and delete any alarms.  Searching for the alarm log, it was there, full of stuff like "Not in Neutral".  Nothing too important so figuring it out the Alarm log and deleting it, all of a sudden there was 128 mb of memory, more than enough!  With that said, it is still a struggle to figure everything out on these electronics as I have only scratched the surface.  That and the fact is any update can force one to relearn everything, most of it is intuitive once you start thinking about it, but admittedly it can be hard to keep up.

So it was a very successful day, we ended up with 30 walleyes, I would say that 24 of them were over 22 inches with the largest being 26, 27 and a 28 incher.  Leeches were the ticket and with the wind, slip bobber fishing turned out to be the most successful as well as tolerable!  I still have to get the jon boat out on the river although the river is up again.  My friend Bill's mom Phyllis is not doing so well so say a prayer for her, she is such a sweetheart! I could go on and on but there is work to be done.  next week I need to talk about my Fell MOB system, a very nice addition to the boat.