The Great Lakes gets a lot of headlines when it comes to off the charts smallmouth bass fishing and deservingly so, I have witnessed Lake Michigan smallmouth fishing first hand.
The Friday before Father’s Day, my Dad, myself and a buddy traveled to a Minnesota lake with a local reputation for excellent smallmouth fishing. We have talked about fishing it for years and drove by it numerous times on the way to tournaments and other fishing trips. The lake is kind of a large bowl, so wind is a bit of a factor, so you need to plan your trips accordingly.
Finally on this day, the wind forecast seemed fishable and I had the time to go, so we hooked up the boat and drove 2 hours north to Lake Mille Lacs. We started on the south end where we were exposed to the wind, the first 4 hours produced about 6 smallmouth, 2 largemouth and a nice walleye, nothing to write home about and wind was becoming an issue, so we trailered the boat around to the east side.
Once in the water, on the calmer shore, it did not take us long to bust things wide open. We couldn’t generate many strikes on reaction baits or topwater, but we went on to put a clinic on big smallmouth with bottom bouncing tubes and soft plastics.
We easily caught over 50 smallmouth bass, with the best 5 weighing 24-25lbs, we weighed most of our bigger fish, but my scale gave out and we had to take the length conversion on a couple of our 20” plus smallmouth. About half of our fish fell into the 17” plus category and a good chunk of those were around 19 inches, solid 4lbs plus smallies.
In the end, I can’t believe this was my first time fishing smallmouth on Mille Lacs and it won’t be my last! I am willing to say this is probably one of the best, if not best, inland smallmouth fisheries in the country. I can’t share all my pics in this post, but follow this link to see the best of the rest!
Here is the kicker, this place is a world class walleye factory, trophy muskies, and has little know largemouth bass population that will turn your head as well.
Rich
RichLindgren.com
