Mille Lacs update 8/31

Stable weather = Good fishing

Yesterday's trip was a pretty good example of the fishing last week, so I'll elaborate. We fished a mix of weeds and rocks, sampling (*see below) and moving on and hitting a combination of weeds, shallow rock, and reef edges. Yesterday's fish showed themselves on the weeds and reef edges. We had two strikes and a couple follows, but unfortunately put nothing in the net. On one fish hit a Big Joe fished off the edge of a major community reef. The fish wasn't hooked - I'll post a separately about fishing soft plastics and light strikes. The other strike also hit a Big Joe and was on for a few seconds but didn't stay pinned, or wasn't pinned at all and just opened it's mouth. Remarkably, both hits were in complete daylight and had nothing to do with majors or moon periods; they may have been related to wind shifts. It's a bummer to keep the net dry all day when there's plenty of fish activity, but that's musky fishing. Musky fishing would be a bad activity for anyone who can't deal with disappointment or lost opportunity. One of the follows after dark was pretty hot. It followed a pretty nice home-made double-10 [most home-made baits look like crap, this one was nice - heavy wire, good looking skirt, nicely twisted loop, big hooks, good split rings, etc - all the stuff the cheapo crappy home-made lures are generally lacking. That's my editorial about home-made baits]. Where was I? Oh yes, the hot follow. After a slow-rolling retrieve with the double-10, the guest at the front of the boat executed a very good figure-8 and - big, wide turns, no pauses, etc. - and the fish spooked and boiled as the bait was lifted. That sucks. No one did anything wrong, it just didn't eat. Again, that's musky fishing.

The weather last week was stable and the fishing was consistently pretty good all week. Not dynamite - they weren't committing suicide - but pretty good. The main-lake surface temp yesterday was 67 F and the water is fairly green.

This is a beautiful time of year to be on the water. The nights are cool and crisp, but the days are still warm. Go fishing.


* Sampling is an emerging term that's beginning to enter the fishing jargon. It's meaning is somewhat like run-and-gun. Yesterday's fishing was a good example. First we hit some weeds, but rather than hit the whole weed bed we just 'sampled' my favorite 150-200 yd. stretch of outside edge. Then we hit a few spot-on-the-spot shallow rock spots to 'sample' the shallow rock. Finding no fish, we then fished deeper and covered a stretch of the breakline at the edge of the reef. We were on one of the huge, well-known reefs and rather then fish the whole edge, which would take hours and hours, we hit a hundred yards stretch that I really like. While fishing this spot there was a hit on a Big Joe. Guess what we did the rest of the day? Yep, we spent more time fishing deeper and hitting the edges of reefs. It worked and we briefly had another fish on a Big Joe from another reef edge. That's sampling, and that's how to use it to figure out that day's pattern.