Mille Lacs Smallies

[Juan Grande]

Guys,

Anyone hit Mille Lacs this past weekend for bass? I had limited time on the water so I focused on the shallow rock piles. Not sure if the bass hadn't moved up yet for the summer or if the unstable weather scattered them, but we had a hard time finding fish.

We fished from Flamingo reef down to Isle bay and only had several small fish to show for it. Fish were caught on a yellow grub. Couldn't get anything to hit the usual standby baits (tubes, hair jigs, cranks, senkos, etc).

In hindsight, I probably should have fished some deeper rocks in the 8-12 ft range. We were up this same time last year and saw bass all over the shallow rocks all day long. Saw very few fish this year. The water was around 70 degrees and the levels are definitely up from last year.

What would your plan B have been?

[Cecil]

Prob a lil deeper like you said. If the sun isnt high they tend to not be up to well. Sun heats rocks, crawfish come out, smallies eat...

[Juan Grande]

So kind of the opposite of everything else? If it's sunny and clear then go shallow?

[Cecil]

Thats kind of what I've seen out there. That water never gets really warm so they are a lil diff than your avg mn lake. A lil wind always helps them to be less spooky, but not too much...

[RK]

Hiya -

I'd agree that moving off a little bit is something to try. Especially if the weather's unstable smallies can sometimes slide off the top of reefs and pull back to steeper breaks or along the edges where rock meets the sand. It gets kind of tricky because it's a good news/bad news scenario. Good news is fish get pretty concentrated. Bad news is they can be hard to find. I fish search baits like heavy tubes, jerk shads on a jighead fished like a jerkbait, etc. Once I get a fish to react I can slow down and fish them with a drop shots or something like it. Drop shot may be the best way to catch them if they're off a little bit, but it's too slow to use as a search lure.

There is another possibility too - they may have moved to take advantage of a different forage source like perch or shiners. If there are sandgrass or cabbage beds nearby it's worth checking out. Smallies are fish eaters a lot of the time - it's not all crayfish.

Cheers,

Rob Kimm

[Juan Grande]

Thanks for the tips guys, I'll try that next time.

I'm always amazed at how much the walleye rules up there. Whenever we're at a launch or coming in someone asks how we did. I may be paranoid, but I swear I get some strange looks when I tell them I was bass fishing.

[gunning]

I was up there for a day two weeks ago and only caught 2 smallies. We just fished rock points and flats in 4-10 feet of water. The water temp was in the mid 60's and I found out later when we got off the lake it had dropped about 10 degrees in a few days. We talked to a one of the DNR fisheries guys at the landing and he said the smallies had finished spawning about two weeks before we fished there and most of them that were being caught were in the 12-18ft range so I guess we were just not looking deep enough, lesson learned.