Lake of the Woods Walleye Report
We were kicking around the idea of making a Rainy river trip this past weekend, but being the bite really hasn't picked up yet we decided to go to the lake instead. Saturday morning my crew and I headed out of the Graceton beach access for one last ice trip of the year. The ice road was closed to vehicles a half ton or larger, so we used our snowmobiles and wheelers for transportation. The majority of the fishermen were within a few miles of the access, and from what I’ve heard, fishing has been quite spotty. Our plan was to head out to some main lake structure in hopes of locating some unpressured fish.
After traveling another 10 miles across the jagged icy terrain we arrived at the area we wanted to fish. Not to plug Otter, but we BEAT those houses and they made the rough trip in stride! On the other hand, my buddies “light blue house” needed some reassembling after the trip. The area we decided to fish was a small flat and normally I’d fish the structure itself, but being a cold front had just moved through we opted to search the deep 34’-36’ areas surrounding the flat. It was nearly 12:00, with the wind howling at a pretty good clip by the time we found what we were looking for, Walleye! We were then able to set up the houses and relax. The four of us enjoyed consistent action for the rest of the day and we ended up icing over 100 fish. Granted we caught a number of small sauger mixed in, but we ended up with our limits of both nice walleye and sauger. The walleye were 19”-16”, the sauger were 16”-14” and they all appeared to be very well fed!
The fish definitely needed to be coaxed into biting. Making them chase your lure up 10 feet before they would commit was not uncommon. Situations like this, is where the 12 foot zoom option on the Marcum LX5 really shined. It was great having the exact area I was interested in, zoomed in! We were using a combination of gold/perch colored Lindy Frostees and Rattlin Flyers tipped with minnows. I had one rod rigged up with a Frostee jigging spoon and the other with a Rattlin Flyer. It seemed like when I had a timid fish down there the rattle and slow fall of the Rattlin Flyer was the ticket, but when a fish came in hot it would hammer the Frostee. This one-two punch put one heck of a pile of fish on the ice for us.
The ice is very honeycombed, but should be fine for ATV travel for another couple weeks. Just watch out for breakers and stay away from the danger areas like the Gap and islands. The fishing was HOT, so if you’re on the fence about whether to hit the Rainy River or the Lake, I’d say it’s a no brainer until the fish start to make their move up the river. Good Luck and be safe!
