Mille Lacs smallmouth report!
I did get a chance to do a little smallmouth fishing these last few days up on Mille Lacs. There were actually a ton of people I saw fishing for them which is a good thing, don’t let the walleye closure come September 6th make you not fish this amazing smallmouth fishery! Keep coming up and supporting the local business’.
After the bass masters tournament it, put lake Mille Lacs on the map for one of the top fisheries to catch a mega bag of sallies! Is it as easy as they make it seem on tv? No! But with the right approach a giant lake like this you can zone in on them still. So what I found was bigger numbers of fish were off shore and on the rock filled reefs. Now I did do a little shoreline searching with only finding smaller fish and not good numbers. So what I did is take some offshore rock structure and just really key in on where these fish were sitting. What I found was best depths were 21’-28’. Now conditions dictated a lot to where these fish would be sitting. When the skies were cloudy they would be on the tops of these rock bars which where I was around that 21’. Something about small mouth a clouds it seems to flip a switch and they eat! Now where the skies were bluebird and sunny they pulled further off the edges of these humps and were a lot tougher to get to eat. Best spots on the structure was the bigger boulders off rock reefs of right smack dab on top these reefs. There are several ways to get these footballs to eat. If your a live bait type you cannot beat rigging sucker minnows! I myself am more an artificial bait type when scouting. For this drop shots were king. It allows you to get a small plastic right in front of their faces. Also small football jigs can be very lethal as well. Simply mark the fish and then just keep dragging it bye them until they bite! A good way I also track down these fish is running lead until you start catching as few that way you can rule out which parts of the reef they are on and then key in on them from there. Trolling them I noticed the slower I went the better they would eat. Id drop to 1.8mph on some turns and maxed at about 2.3mph. Needless to say if your into catching giant smallmouth this lake is for you! Thanks to all who read my reports and like and share my page you are the ones that make this possible for me I’m very grateful for all of you!
