Lake of the Woods Update - May 13/10

I headed out to make sure everything on the boat was working properly and explore some new areas of the lake. First thing that surprised me was just how low the water is this year. It's an honest 18 - 24" low in most areas. Even launching the boat was a touchy deal, there's not much ramp left in the water! I really want to stress safe travel on the lake right now, especially if you don't know your way around. My map chip was really inaccurate for depths in a lot of areas. One area shown as 7' was actually 2' and another shown as 4' had birds standing on the exposed reef. Morale of the story, don't just rely on a GPS map to navigate, especially with low water.

Warmest water we found was 52 degrees, but most of the lake was hovering between 48-50. A cold front arrived about 2 minutes after launching the boat so I got to fish in the wind and pouring rain all day. Most of the fish we found were quite sluggish. Lots of follows from the pike and smallies. We fished both rocks and weeks and tried everything - jigs, plastics, tubes, jerkbaits, spinnerbaits, and even topwater in all shapes and colors and jerkbaits outperformed substantially. Finding healthy weeds seemed to be the ticket.

Many of the fish were poorly hooked or got hooked in the side of the face. Seems like lazy nips and bumping the bait was all they were interested in doing. In total, we put about 50 fish in the boat, mostly pike with a few smallies in there as well. Nothing of any size to brag about, but there were a few decent ones in there.

They are calling for great weather this weekend and early next week which should warm things up a bit. That should get everything moving again!

Andrew Klassen