Living in Northern Minnesota it’s easy to get spoiled by the easy access to many excellent walleye fishing opportunities within minutes of my home. So it should be easy to understand why someone in my position has always suspected that the buzz about lake Mille Lacs was a mixture of hype and a by-product of the lake’s size and proximity to the Twin Cities metro area. I fished the lake once before in my teens and hadn’t considered returning since. But when we were given the opportunity to fish the Cabela’s NTC tournament on Lake Mille Lacs we decided to grab it and take our shot at the big pond.
As is my nature, I began preparing by reading everything I could find regarding the lake and the variety of tactics anglers use to put walleyes in the boat. For the 2012 season the state DNR expanded the protected slot to include fish between 17 and 28 inches. In other words, our basket of fish had to be comprised of fish under 17 inches or over 28 inches. So the strategy going in… which I’m sure we shared with 250 other boats… was to find the unders as quickly as possible and then go looking for a big girl.
The weekend before the tournament we made the 2.5 hour drive to do a little pre-fishing. We picked a great day… winds ripping out of the east, threats of rain… welcome to Mille Lacs. I was in no mood to pound the rivets out of the boat, so we took a leisurely 1 hour ride to go about 8 miles to one of several candidate locations we had marked on our map. The good news is that on our first drift across reef #1 Trevor boated a great mid-20s walleye. A couple more drifts and another nice walleye was enough to convince us this spot had potential. We bounced around to a couple more locations and were a getting a bit frustrated as we watched other boats pulling in fish using the exact same presentation. We began to wonder if our drift speed was a bit too fast. We had one last spot we wanted to hit for the day. We hit the leading edge and started drifting across when I latched into another nice mid-20s walleye. After a couple more drifts we decided to drop the bow mount trolling motor and hunt around the edges for fish. As it turns out, this was a very fortunate accident. I motored around to the southeast corner of the flat and pointed the nose of the boat into the wind. Right of the edge of this corner we marked a good bunch of fish and dropped our lines with the boat nearly hovering over the fish. I immediately had a bite and reeled in another fattie. We kept working through the school and picked up a few more fish and were convinced that our earlier assumption was correct and that we needed to keep the speed of the presentation as slow and as nearly vertical as possible. In all, we were pleased with what we were able to learn and left encouraged that we would be able to find a few more spots and get similar results.
We planned to head back down on Monday, but the thunderstorm activity we saw on the radar was enough to make us scrap the trip for the day and take our chances that the Wednesday before the tournament would yield enough information to give us a shot at weighing some decent walleyes on Thursday and Friday. We arrived early again with a much lighter wind than what we had been greeted with on Sunday. We headed straight to the mud flats at the north end and started scouring the tops and edges of a few we had marked on the map. Our plan was to search and only drop a line when we actually marked fish. The idea was great, but again our natural stubbornness kept us on a couple of humps a little longer than we probably should have stayed. We continued this pattern bouncing from flat to flat, east to west marking a few fish here and there, but not really finding anything to get too excited about. We finally made our way back to the southwest end and a large flat that we had marked as a possibility. We marked a few fish along the edges, but wanted to explore some interesting structure between the flat and the shoreline. As we moved closer to the area it appeared that a few other boats were working the area. We marked a few fish, dropped our lines and almost immediately had fish. Over the course of the next hour we boated enough sub-17 inch fish to easily conclude that we needed to start Thursday on this very spot. Pre-fishing concluded.
Thursday turned out to be a beautiful, calm morning. We made it over to Izaty’s for check-in and take-off and headed right to the flat we ended with on the previous afternoon. Several other boats had already settled in with the same idea. We were in a mix of tournament and non-tournament boats and it was apparent from the beginning that the bite was not quite the same as it had been the previous afternoon. Our first keeper was just over the 14 inch minimum and was followed over the next couple of hours by a few smaller fish, one just over 17 and another couple of over-20 walleyes. We decided to cut out and head to our “big fish” option hoping that we could find one or two more unders to add to the live well. The walleyes were still hanging out on the same corner of the flat we found them on Sunday and it didn’t take too long to start catching fish. As was the case on Sunday, most of what we boated were walleyes in the 23-26 inch range, but we were lucky enough to find another small keeper to put in the live well during our search. We had our most exciting moment of the day when I latched into a fish that was quite obviously more substantial than anything we had boated to this point. She stayed down for what seemed like an eternity, but I was able to slowly coax her up to the boat where Trev got the net under her and hauled her in the boat. We quickly removed the hook and laid the fish out on the ruler to discover that we were .75 inches short of the magic 28 inch mark. We snapped the shot to the left and sent her back to the depths. After catching a few more big fish we decided to head back to our original spot to try to get three more fish to weigh. The crowds had thinned out but there were still a few fish to be had. As it turns out, Trev was able to hook into two more small fish to at least give us four to weigh. We blazed back to Izaty’s and recorded our 3.92 pounds for the day. Not exactly stellar, but we still had a shot at cracking the upper ranks with a big fish on Friday.
The game plan for Friday was to head straight to our big fish flat and work as hard as we could to find a big girl. Hopes were high as we almost immediately marked and caught walleyes. Big walleyes. Which was beginning to get a little annoying, odd as that may seem. We worked that flat all day and slowly ground out fish with the rare keeper mixed in along the way. The excitement for the day came when I latched into an obviously heavy fish. I was pulling a crawler in about 30 feet when I simply felt resistance. When I set the hook there was no give and my heart started to pound. I was able to reel up to the point where we could see the slip sinker and then she zipped off a few more yards of line. We were sure we finally found our over, but when I finally raised the beast off the bottom we were greeted with a musky that measured well into the mid 40 inch range. Exciting, but not exactly what we were looking for. At about 2:00 we started talking about moving back to our flat on the east side to pick up a couple more keepers to fill our limit when we pulled in keeper number four. Sure that it would be easy to catch one more in the next hour we hung on. We had boated a few fish around 26 inches and knew that there had to be a bigger fish on this flat. This point was proven shortly before our afternoon ended when another team in a blue ranger started hooting and hollering as they pulled in what was surely one of the few 28 inch fish caught for the day. We never did get our fifth under, but we left feeling like we gave ourselves the best shot at finding a big fish. Our final weight was just over 4 pounds which put our total just over 8 pounds… middle of the pack.
There has been a bit of grumbling about the slot on lake Mille Lacs, but it really is hard to complain about the number of fish we caught over the course of the week. The keepers were hard to find, but that was probably more a function of preparation on our part. For the most part, when we marked fish we caught them… a walleye angler’s dream on any lake. After years of ignoring Mille Lacs, I think it’s safe to say we will make another trek south in the future to try our hand at boating some big walleyes.
