Ballard's - Lake of the Woods, Minnesota

Non-typical trophy bite…

Sportsfans — hello and welcome to the weekly brash here on Lake of the Woods.

A “non-typical” trophy bite?  Yes.  We have one going on.  Right now.

And here’s how it started…  A couple days ago we were greeted with some really rainy, windy, basically crap weather.  And it restricted basically where and what we could do as far as fishing and travel. 

We were restricted to the mud flats.  Basically about two miles off-shore in 30-31 feet of water.  And what else?  It was even too windy to anchor and plop down a jig.

So…  With that in mind…  There weren’t a ton of options.

We were left with drifting spinners / live bait rigging in the mud.  Something that we almost entirely never do.

And you want to know what happened next?  Well…  We lined up twelve guide boats…  Starting drifting the mud with spinners…  And ABSOLUTELY started hammering the walleyes!

This lake, there’s no other way to put it, is incredibly resourceful.  Never, never, never in the past would we ever have even thought about successfully catching fish in the mud just randomly drifting two to two and half miles off-shore in late July.  But it happened. 

Now I’m talking about lining up in just over 30ft of water and making a 1.5 to 2 mile drift.  This is the kinda stuff that I used to here about people doing on Lake Erie.  But Lake of the Woods?  Who’d a thunk it.

As they say…  We’ll take what we can get. 

Prior to this late found “mud-thing”, the reefs had been doing quite well.  Good overall action.  But maybe not the trophy size that we’ve found in the mud.  It’s a coin toss.  Either can be quite good.

Hey…  We’ve got lots of options going into this weekend.  It should be a boomer.

Set the hook!