Fishers of Men Mille Lacs 02

This report is an old Basspastor/Annonymous post from FishingMinnesota.com. The tournament was a huge dissappointment, except for the fact that I got back a big tackle bag that blew out of the boat. We had a great area on Mille Lacs all to ourselves yet couldn't convert it into a high finish.

On July 6th
Fishers of Men Mn Division 15boats?
Mille Lacs Partly Cly to clear SE 5-15MPH
I had prefished for this tournament on three separate occasions. All 3 days I located largemouth. Smallies With the 21" minimum and limit of 1 made a limit of largemouth the better gamble.

Size in prefishing was generally 13-16" with a couple in the 3 and 4lb range. I found them in boat channels and heavy cover area's especially if there were multiple types in an area. (reeds, bulrushes, cabbage, pads, etc.) I was fishing the S to SE side of the lake. 1-7ft of water

I was very confident going into tournament day that we would catch fish. The only question is whether we would get some bigger ones. We didn't land any. We dropped several fish. Actually it was mostly my partner as that his gear was probably not quite heavy enough.

We had a good weedless frog/ buzzbait bite in the morning. Fish were very much related to the outside edges early. Unfortunatly we did not work from outside to inside and only figured out that's where they were about the time the sun started getting higher pushing them back in.

We took a short run to some new water across the way that I had not scouted It looked good but we came up with nothing. We went back to the area that obviously was holding quite a few fish. No hits on frogs so we switched to jignpigs. Managed to cull a couple more and catch a few more that went right back. In the last hour we went despiration Smallie fishing. No luck. We proobably caught 14 to 20 fish that measured, no dinks.

I know we had 10lb's something but am still not sure of our exact place.

Winners;
Scott Bonnema & Paul Newman 17.6lbs
Apparently mostly on jigs
Big Fish was 4.94
for more on this tournament see mnfom.com

Ps You don't have to go into as much detail. But include Lake, date, #0f boats something about conditions and what you did and placed.

Aitken Jaycess Ice Tourny

Try your Luck on the Dead Sea?

Not too Crowded.


Well it was a beautiful morning when I and Don Weinmeister set about after fame and fortune on the Mille Lacs Lake glacier. Ok it was a little hazy, but the temps were good and there was very little wind. The Contest was sponsored by the Aitkin Jaycees (duh!) and was held out of Barnacle's Resort on the NE corner of the "Big Pond."

We arrived a little over an hour and a half early and did some scouting with the Vex. We immdiately found water 26ft deep and marked fish. We basically decided that was good enough and set up shop in the NE corner of the designated fishing area. Sure enough as soon as the contest started I had fish looking at my offerings.

Unfortunatly I didn't catch anything until about 45 minutes in when I seriously downsized to maggies and then all was catching were 2-3" perch. Finally I got a couple of perch I thought might have a shot at the prizes. I weighed the biggest, but by then he wasn't big enough to make the Top 25 for prizes. I gave it a good effort in the last hour but just could not get a bigger fish to go. I pretty much had crowds of little perch around the whole time from start to finish.

Since it was so nice out, Don and I decided to fish while the crowds made there way off the ice. There are a few more Ice Contests I hope to hit this winter. Maybe if I was able to weigh all the Perch I caught, I would have had enough to get a prize. Oh well, it's just a Ice Fishing contest and the money goes to the community.

Here's Don