An extremely late spring certainly has made fish in southern Manitoba and Northwestern Ontario crazy! Crazy hungry that is! If you can get out fishing right now on our lakes and rivers, do so. On a trip this past week back to Lake of the Woods water temperatures had risen to the high 50’s, a real key to making these fish move into shallow water in an attempt to fatten up. We started out fishing in a huge bay that had extended sections of shallow water.
HOW TO FIND THE FISH
I have done many Complete Angler shows in remote section of western Canada but this past trip had the most similarity to one I did at Island Lake Lodge in northern Alberta a few years back. We found huge pike and walleye scattered across mud flats in 8 feet of water and caught the fish trolling Rapala Husky Jerks.
Since conditions were very similar on this recent trip we started out fishing the same pattern. Funny thing though we did not catch a fish at this depth using this technique. Still I wasn’t discouraged, I knew the fish had to be somewhere in this bay given the overcast conditions and perfect water temperature. So I dropped down the front troll motor and kept working shallower. As soon as we entered five feet of water, we started catching one pike after another, many triple headers. I then started experimenting with different lures to see if we could catch any larger pike. My most effective big pike lure produced once again…a chartreuse and white Rapala Sub Walk triggered much larger pike to bite. As I headed further back into the bay, all of sudden my front depthfinder started showing deeper water. It went from four feet to seven feet along one of the shorelines, an old river channel…then bingo, one of my friends hooked onto an extremely large walleye using a smaller Husky Jerk. Then it was one fish after another as moved further into the bay working both sides of the deeper water channel. As we neared the end of the island that was situated in the middle of this huge bay, the old channel started to shallow up a bit into five feet. Still, there was fish back here as shallow as three feet.
One of the most exciting moments of the day came when a huge pike swallowed the smallmouth bass I had hooked off a shoreline rock pile. Then at the end of the day a huge walleye hit my small orange Husky Jerk at the side of the boat, taking my lure with him as he exited stage left…wow what a day!
Tomorrow on my blog, day two of our trip and smallmouth heaven.
