About two weeks ago, I finally got out on the water for the first time this year (yes, lame, I know). Our weird Spring has caused a delay in the start of the fishing season for me, but the good news is I didn’t have to wait long for bass opener to come around. Not that I was fishing that day.
I was able to connect up with Greg who I got out with a few times last year. We decided to try some new water a few clicks North of The Cities. The Minnesota DNR web site showed the lake as a good walleye lake so we had intended to backtroll and lindy rig with leeches. But the day turned out to be really sunny so we scrapped that idea thinking they wouldn’t be too active with it being so bright.
We were on the water at about 6:30pm and using the Navionics app on my phone, we found a hump a few hundred yards off the boat launch. We knew we were in the right place when we started seeing submerged weeds. I threw out some worms and jigs and got a nibble or two, but nothing significant enough to hook into.
After about a half hour we motored to the far end of the lake where we saw a point. It was quite shallow with lily pads, but if there were fish there, they weren’t interested in what we were tossing at them. Greg had added some nice chairs to his Alumacraft, though, so relaxing on the bench gave me an excuse to dead-stick my baits.
We tried the Western shore, but didn’t get much luck there either. We decided to try some lily pads we saw on the Northwest corner when we first got on the lake. The area was screaming for topwater baits so that’s what Greg and I started out with. After a number of casts, I got a hit outside the weedline. It turned out to be this little Northern.
Unfortunately, that would be our only fish for the night. Greg doesn’t have a depth finder, so we were a bit blind out there. Still, we thought we would do better than that in our first outing. My brother-in-law, and Greg’s best friend, was coming into town the following weekend, so we hoped to have better luck then.
