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I will post fish now. Pretty fish:    Toothy fish:   Walleye fish:   Prehistoric fish:   Ugly fish:   I hope you guys liked the fish.
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Jan 20, 2016 05:30
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Holy moly, how did I not know this thread existed until now? I've been in the ask/tell thread for a couple years but never knew about this one. I love fishing, but don't get to do it as much as I'd like anymore. I live in MN and primarily fish for walleye, but will also go after sunfish, crappie, northern pike depending on the time of year. One of my buddies fishes like 250+ days a year on the St. Croix river so I will join him for walleye, lake sturgeon and catfishing. I do a lot of fishing on lake of the woods, which is the 2nd biggest inland lake in the US if you exclude the great lakes. I could do a big post about ice fishing up there in the winter cause it's quite the operation. They put big tracks(like a tank) on Econoline vans that are chopped off behind the drivers seat. They build a big enclosure on the back that's stuffed with foam and take people 5-10 miles out onto the lake. We usually fish out of portable houses with snowmobiles, but the track vans are pretty wild, the resort brings out over 300 people per day! https://www.google.com/search?q=arn...QGbOr11bgBxSjM: I also just got back from a week long trip to Canada with my wife, I wrote up a big long report on walleye central about it, but I'd be happy to re-post here if people are interested in reading. It's...really long. Until then, I'll just post some cherry picked photos of my best fish of the last 5 years or so  . Big walleye, I believe this one was 27.5" and 9.5#, which is heavy for that length:  Same day, 28.5" walleye which was 10.5#, my standing personal best!  37" northern caught on Lake of the woods:  Flathead catfish, I think it was around 35#:  53" lake sturgeon, from the same day as the flathead above:  Another random walleye, low 20s by the looks of it:  Let me know if you want like 10 really long posts detailing my whole trip to Five Lakes Lodge in Red Lake, Ontario!
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Jul 12, 2018 01:32
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joem83 posted:Welcome to the thread my man! Post pics/stories always, we love it. You need to back off with the walleye pics though, or else Sockington might have to start a turf war with you. He'll drive his 900 lb boat all the way down to MN to bash your kneecaps with an Ugly Stik, which are of course indestructible and therefore the best suited for the task. I haven’t made it through the whole thread but I definitely saw his posts! He appears to fish a lot more often than I do. Sockington, you ever try B’Fishn Tackle soft plastics? Both those big walleye were caught on a river in February on their 4” moxi plastics. Those are by far my favorite soft plastic. http://customjigs.com/products/authentx-moxi.html I like the purple sparkle one with the chartreuse tail the best .
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Jul 12, 2018 04:14
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Sockington posted:Sockington fishing thread continues. Nice fish! Can’t judge size great from the photos, is the longest one 19-20? Others look somewhere in that 15-18” range, which are absolutely my favorite size to eat. Makes me wish I was out fishing  . I do have a trip planned for lake of the woods in September though, I’m getting pretty excited! I also spend an inordinate amount of time looking at fishing resorts to build out my bucket list. Taltson bay big pike lodge is the one I’m currently drooling over for anyone interested.
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Jul 23, 2018 19:12
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A Pack of Kobolds posted:I would still like to hear everything you know about crappies if the offer is still open! Dang, I forgot to answer that ! I don’t know all they much about crappies but I know a little. My time fishing for crappies is mainly limited to crappie spawning time(spring) and winter crappies(ice fishing).
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Jul 23, 2018 22:05
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A Pack of Kobolds posted:What else do you fish for under the ice? If you go ice fishing this winter you should definitely post pics. Not a lot of ice fishing happening ITT. Getting drunk in a shack may be a familiar topic ITT though. I’ll write up a crappie post when I’m not on my phone for ya! As for ice fishing, I fish for walleye/bluegill/crappie/northern under the ice. Ice fishing is amazing, GIVEN you have the appropriate equipment to get on the ice and stay comfortable in the cold. I have a portable ice house and a propane heater that probably keeps the house 50 degrees or warmer, so I can sit out all day or night and not even be bothered by the cold. I’ve fished a few days up north where it was -10 with 25+mph winds. Those are the days you bunker down and don’t make many moves. But once you get set up it’s actually quite comfortable to fish in.
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Jul 24, 2018 01:55
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Probably long posts incoming. A Pack of Kobolds posted:Thanks, I'd really appreciate it! Ice fishing sounds like a really good way to spend a weekend in the winter. Well here's what I know about crappie(not a lot). Like I said, my time spent fishing for crappie is normally in the early spring when they are spawning, or in the winter. Around here, crappies will start spawning when the water is like mid 50s or a bit higher it seems. It's one of the easiest times to target them as they will often move into shallow weedy bays to spawn. In a lot of lakes that water will be like under 5 feet deep and the crappies will be visible from a boat or elevated position. They are also normally pretty aggressive at this time, probably protecting their spawning beds and stuff like bass are known to do. A lot of people will use bobbers and crappie minnows, but lightweight jigs(1/32 oz, 1/16 oz) and some small soft plastics can work great! Cast them out and kind of swim/pop them back to the boat. Crappies can sometimes get a reputation(especially in the winter) for being tight lipped an finicky, but not during this spawning period. Crappies actually have quite large mouths, they will attack much larger baits than you might think. We used to troll shallow running shad raps and catch loads of them growing up, so small crankbaits are another good option in spring, as long as they float and don't dive too deep, I just prefer a single hook as their mouths are so delicate, the trebles can really eat them up sometimes. After spawn I'm worthless for the most part on crappies, they will move out over deeper water sometimes, or not, or be on deep weedlines, or not? I think the really successful summer crappie fishermen will rely a lot of their electronics to find them. Ice fishing though is a different story! Once the lakes are locked up, they will normally gravitate towards 'relatively deep' basins in the lake. Shallow water on frozen lakes normally lack oxygen once the ice gets thick. The sun doesn't penetrate much(especially if there is a lot of snow), the weeds die, and there just isn't much oxygen there. That doesn't bother some types of fish, northern are known for occupying unbelievably shallow water in the winter at times, but crappies generally won't. In moderately to deep lakes, I look for 25-40 foot deep basins, often trying to find the deepest hole of the basin. Drill some holes and drop down my Marcum and it's immediately apparent if crappies are there. The 'relative' part is extremely important though. Some lakes are really shallow, or some large lakes will have large shallow bays/sections of them. If you can find the 'relatively' deep parts of the lake you can normally find crappie. There is a is a large lake in the west side of theTwin Cities that has a lot of crappies, and even more fishermen. There will be hundreds and hundreds of ice houses set out over the 30-40 foot holes in the popular parts of the lake. However, there are some large shallow bays that people will completely ignore because they look at the depth map and say, "that's way too shallow for crappies". Which is good for us, sure, 95% of the bay is choked with weeds and <8 feet deep, but there's a 13 foot deep section in the middle that just holds TONS of sunfish and crappies. That's basically what I know about crappies, I can't find my picture of my PB crappie from that lake, which was 14.5"(need to get a bigger one ), but here's a decent one from the same lake: 
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Jul 27, 2018 03:41
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Double post of the century coming up! I wanted to post the trip report from Five Lakes Lodge that my wife and I took. Five Lakes Lodge is located in Red Lake, Ontario, and is awesome! I wrote this up for walleye central so I'm just copy pasting here, hope nobody minds. It's pretty detailed, so feel free to ignore. I'll post a day or two at a time and if people want me to keep posting I'll gladly oblige, but it will be like a huge essay if I just dump it in one post. In case you want to try and follow along, here's a map of the lake with some of the areas labeled: https://www.poplarpoint.com/gullrock-lake-map/ Day 1, 6/30: We left our house north of St. Paul at around 7:15, a mere hour and 15 minutes behind schedule, weather was nice, roads weren't too busy so we made good time up to I Falls. Border crossing was a breeze, it was my wife's first time out of the country so she was nervous, but it took maybe 10 minutes to get across the bridge and through the booths. The rest of the drive was pretty uneventful, we did take that little shortcut route west of dryden instead of going through Dryden. I was pretty surprised to find myself on a dirt road(Adams Road), but it did end up faster I think. We arrived into camp around 6 PM, I told my wife "around 9 hours", so we only missed that by a couple . We met the camp owner, Ian, immediately upon entering camp, he directed us to our cabin and we started unloading and I rigged up a couple rods. We only had a few hours of daylight left but wanted to get out on the water to see some of the lake. Ian gave us a quick camp tour and then spent a good 20 minutes going over the lake map with us and marking spots. Not just general areas either, he gave us some very specific locations that really helped us find a few fish on our first couple days! We went out and fished Stephenson's point that night for about an hour and caught a couple fished and missed a few more, just drifting with jigs. Enough action to get us excited about the next day. Immediately upon docking the boat Ian was there asking how we did, he reiterated where he thought we should fish the next day and we went in for some dinner. We came in and cooked up some mac and cheese w/Ring Bologna and called it an early night. Day 2, 7/1 We got up pretty early on Sunday, ate some cinnabons(GREAT idea to bring these up for a quick breakfast), and packed a lunch for the boat. We grabbed a couple dozen minnows and headed over to Two Island Lake to fish a section that Ian had some luck on just a couple days prior. The goal for the day was to get familiar with the lake and try to put some numbers of fish in the boat. My wife loves to fish but doesn't have much walleye experience, so I wanted to do some lindy rigging and vertical jigging to get her comfortable with the techniques. Weather was maybe too good this day, mid to high 70s, and very little wind. Took us probably 25 minutes to get to two island lake and we started off backtrolling lindy rigs(I was using half crawlers, my wife minnows) in 12-16 FOW on the north end of the lake. I'm always nervous on the first day of trips like this as I don't want to completely 'miss'. My worries were quickly washed away as we started getting bites almost immediately. It took both of us some adjustments to timing and after settling on letting the fish take the bait for 3-5 seconds, we started hooking up a lot more frequently. As Ian alluded to, most fish in this area were smaller, many in the 12-15" range, but we were catching fish and that was fine with us! We did some vertical jigging in a spot Ian pointed out(the exact spot, it was easy to find), mainly catching small saugers, but quite a few! Lunch rolled around and we moved back to the portion off 'North Point #1' where we had the most action. I rigged up some slip bobber rigs with 1/8 oz jigheads on the end and we settled in for a relaxing lunch. I bet we caught 5-8 fish while slib bobbering at lunch, which was a blast! Our nicest fish of the morning came on the slip bobbers as well. We put 3 fish in the livewell for dinner and headed on our way. There's a narrow channel that connects GullRock to Two Island and it looked like a 'pikey' spot, so we stopped and casted around some reeds on the way out. Surface temp was 70 degrees so it didn't seem likely we'd catch any big fish doing this, but I figured there'd be some fish in the area. My wife hooked into a small northern that was attacked boatside by a BIG pike. It let go almost immediately, but it was a good seeing a big pike! The little pike had absolutely INHALED the treble hook on her doctor spoon, I spent some time trying to get the hooks out right as Ian pulled up to see how we were doing. He gave us some more encouraging words and tips and we both headed on our way. After lunch we motored out of two island, hoping to explore the north and east end of GullRock lake. I spoke with JohnBoat on here about the lake before my trip, and he suggested trying out 'dogshead point' on the east end of the lake. We motored over there and with the SW wind we were able to setup a nice drift between the 'two ears' of the point. We caught a fair amount of fish doing this, mainly smaller walleye and sauger, but noticed some darkening skies to the SW. It looked like rain was already falling near camp and we were going to get stuck in it. We put on our rain gear just before it started to come down. It looked like maybe we'd be able to avoid some of it by heading further north...that was not the case. We drove up to 'The Gull Rock', which is where most of the bigger fish had been caught as of late, to try and escape some rain and feel out that spot. This spot consisted of a large underwater point(for lack of better word) that sticks out a long ways into the main body of the lake. There is a hittable rock at the end of it, and all sorts of underwater structure around that area. THere are large expanses of 9-11 foot flats, drop offs to 20-25 feet, drop offs to 30 feet, all zig zaggin around the area. I looked at the map which laid it out pretty well, but without a map chip it was tough to get my bearings since this structure was so far off the shoreline. We got pounded by rain as I tried to figure the spot out but eventually got tired of the rain and started to head in. I knew we'd be back in better weather and more favorable conditions. Along the way back I noticed some folks fishing another reef further south, I motored by and from a few hundred yards away tried to estimate their location and set a waypoint on the GPS for later . The GPS ended up being unbelievably useful for some of these main lake areas, even though we didn't have a map chip I could use waypoints to mark mainly the 20' depth contour in these areas. Most of our main lake spots had us fishing in 16-25 FOW so this was extremely helpful. We stopped at the boot on the way in and did some exploring, waypointing and some speed fishing. The fish finders Ian put on the boats were new Lowrance Hook7s I believe, and they did a really good job marking fish. While trying to learn the depth changes around 'the boot', we'd mark fish, I'd pop it in neutral or revers and we'd drop jigs. We probably caught a half dozen fish doing this, which kept us interested. After maybe an hour or so we were pretty hungry and decided to head in for dinner. As we pulled into the dock, Ian walked down the steps and asked how our first day was. We told him where we fished and he had some more tips and again said, 'you guys gotta get to the Gull Rock if you want some bigger fish'. I did a very mediocre job cleaning the fish and we breaded them in italian bread crumbs and parmesen cheese and fried em up, they were pretty good! Ian has setup outdoor propane stoves like this: https://express.google.com/u/0/produ...mpaign=8175035 for all the cabins, and they worked great for frying fish. They'd heat up the oil FAST, and no fish smell or anything in the cabins! All in all it was a good day, we didn't count fish on any day, but I bet we boated 40-50 fish this first day, and missed A LOT of bites with our lindy rigs. No big fish on this day, but plenty of action! I'll post a picture or two after each post, I can't guarantee that they are from those particular days, but they will at least liven it up a bit. 
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Jul 27, 2018 03:50
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I posted this in the ask/tell thread, but I forgot about this thread, hopefully no one minds me double posting :/ I haven't been on here much lately, but it's been an exciting year! I bought a boat! It's a 2005 Ranger Reata 1850VS, and we totally love it so far. It's a 'fish and ski' style boat, but it has the same hull design as Ranger's 'walleye' boats, so it has a deep hull and can handle rougher water. It also has the windshield pretty far forward, which leave a big wide cockpit, which is great for the kids(3 and 13). I'm absolutely in love, we got it at the end of May and I think we've been out 8 times or so around home and we took it for Canada for our 2nd trip up to Five Lakes Lodge near Red Lake, Ontario. Here's the boat!  Our trip to Canada was amazing, I absolutely love the lake and the lodge, great owner, great fishing, just an overall great time. We got up there on the tail end of a mayfly hatch, so fishing wasn't quite as good from a numbers perspective as last year, but we still caught hundreds of fish and we did tie into some bigger fish. Last year our biggest walleye was 25.5", and our biggest northern was 35.5" I think. We had trouble catching Northern pike...on purpose, but I managed to catch three big ones, all while walleye fishing, which made for very exciting fights! Here's a 36" northern caught on a lindy rig, medium light rod, 6 lb test mono. We were slow-trolling lindy rigs in ~16 feet of water and I got snagged on a rock, I ran to the back of the boat to try and lift it out and was able to free it from the snag. Immediately after it came loose from the rock it just got slammed by this fish. Put up a great fight that was more chaotic as we had the bimini top up:  If you zoom into this picture(if I uploaded these right), you can see my little hook just perfectly sitting in the corner of it's mouth:  This was a new personal best northern, 38", caught on my vertical jigging rod, which is a 5'10" medium power fast action rod with 8lb braid on it. We had just finished drifting over a reef that was loaded with walleyes, I decided to just turn the motor on and zoom back to start the drift over. Out of complete laziness, I didn't reel up my little 1/8th ounce jig and minnow. About ten seconds later, with my jig trolling along probably like 10 feet off bottom, it just gets clobbered. This one put up a long fight:  That personal best didn't last long, this one went 39", and put up an absolute legendary battle on 6 lb mono again. We were drifting with lindy's again across a point, I got a bite and missed the hookset. I reeled up to check my minnow and this monster glided up and just lazily grabbed my minnow right next to the boat, like 4" under the surface, it was wild! I didn't think there was any way my line was going to hold up, but against all odds, we landed her:    We caught walleye too!      And the biggest one we got, a nice 27.5":  Our last day the wind shifted and blew in a bunch of smoke/haze from the forest fires, it was pretty eerie:  I just love fishing up there, so many fish, absolutely beautiful and pristine landscapes, it's just paradise , This is one of our favorite spots up there, lots of underwater rocks/structure off of this point: 
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Jul 19, 2019 06:06
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| # ¿ May 8, 2024 05:00 |
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And before anyone says anything, I use lindy rig and spinner rig interchangeably, as I often fish them the same way and rarely if ever use bottom bouncers, rather I use the sliding 'lindy' sinker.
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Jul 19, 2019 06:08
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