2021 Leech Lake Fishing Opener

26 inch Walley,good for 2/3rd place tie

 It is interesting that Google Blogger has changed my e-mail account verification.  Because of this I wasn't sure that everything was ok, so at Opener I had my nephew Kevin Anderson look at my settings and hopefully fixed what the problem is.  If you have received a notification of this post I would appreciate a comment after reading to confirm you received a notification so I can be sure it's working. With that out of the way, finally a fishing report from our 48th Annual Leech Lake Fishing Opener.  The weather was absolutely beautiful, sunshine every day and no wind.  Although this sounds great Leech Lake is a wind lake and usually one needs to fish the windswept points to catch anything.  It wasn't a total bust but it was far from normal that's for sure.  Saturday arrived with the lake pretty calm.  Using the trolling motor became the norm to stay moving.  Being a guy that likes to explore, if the fish weren't cooperating in one area we'd just go exploring.  Ottertail Point seemed to be the place were we caught the largest fish, in fact both first, second, and third place all came from that area.  Chad caught a 26.25 walleye on Saturday out of my boat.  On Sunday I managed to tie my nephew Kevin for 2nd place with each catching a 26 inch both from Ottertail Point.  That was about it for the big fish.  The bite was terrible, for 21 guys we ended up catching 47 walleyes total for 7 boats, 3 days, with 30 kept.  It is rare that we don't come home with our limit of 4 each, not this year.  Water temps were in the low 60's and we tried everything.  I fished every place we could from Steamboat Bay, Star Point, Little and Big Hardwoods Point, Pine Point, Big and Little Stony Point, Submarine Island, Ivan's, all with the same results.

Nice rock bass

Each night I would troll shad raps from 8:30 PM to about 10, it is usually productive.  Three nights of trolling produced 6 walleyes under 11 inches, a northern pike, a one keeper in the 18 inch range.  Like last fall we were trolling on Monday night along the shore when we approached this boat.  The guy yelled out to watch for his nets as he was netting whitefish, I'm sure!!  These were probably the same guys that had nets out last fall whereas we lost 3 crankbaits before realizing we were hung up in some nets.  I asked the guy if the ends were marked, which hi answer was no, but they are down 6 feet so they shouldn't bother you, but if you get hung up I will return your baits....again Right!!!  They set the last net then headed up Portage Bay without lights.  We should have done is find the first net he put down then check to see if any whitefish were in there, if walleyes we could definitely release them as they were targeting whitefish.  Deciding to let it go we just started trolling up the shore further which is where we caught our 1-18 inch fish but that was it.  It was beautiful traveling the lake as we could travel fast.  Heading back to Brindley's we noticed all the lights on Pine Point.  It looked as though everyone was anchored and bobber fishing.  Well apparently those that bobber fished at night did pretty well.  The fish fly hatch was terrible as there were flies all over everything, which might explain the leech bite.  Never the less we stuck to our old habits as we would have had to go to town and get lighted bobbers and leeches anyway.  We probably would have done better.  The northern bite was pretty good however the regulations was anything between 22 - 26 inches needed to be released and I swear every one was 24 inches, like they all came out of the same mold.  As well one of our group caught a nice eelpout and we did manage a few nicer perch and some pretty big rock bass.  Certainly that is not what we were looking for but catching something is better than nothing!

I am going to post this without pictures as Google says there is something wrong, try later.  Later tonight I'll see if it's still working or I'll have to call Kevin up to help fix it again.  Looks like it got fixed.