June 30 – July 1, 2013 Frank Doucet

Frank and his partner Tony rented our two-person boat for a week fishing on Rainy Lake. Frank and Tony like to fish with artificial baits. We started in the weedy bays casting for northern. We saw what Frank called “zoomers” small pike flashing like lightning at the Johnson Silver Minnow.

We moved out into Cranberry Bay looking for new cabbage growth. We found really nice-looking cabbage, Tony hooked up a smallmouth on his buzz bait and soon after a nice pike that looked to be in the 32” range. Tony’s lone broke and away he went. We moved to a pencil reed area close to the deeper water, we saw fish surfacing but no interested parties. We did not have a breath of wind.

We moved to the first reefs outside the bays bordering the deeper water. Frank switched to a fire tiger Husky Jerk, I put a chrome black ribbed Rat’l Trap on Tony line. We started catching nice large walleyes on the reefs but no pike. We kept moving to new reefs outside the bays and continued to catch walleyes along with nice smallmouth.

We moved to a current area and fished the downstream side of wing dams and points. Walleyes were in pretty good along with some really nice smallmouth.

On day two we had a breeze blowing right away. I took Tony and Frank to a different area. We started on outer islands of a fairly large bay. Frank’s first cast he hooked up with a good pike about 36” long. The fish had his Husky Jerk cross ways in its mouth. Right before our eyes the fish open his mouth and let the bait go.  I really thought Frank had a good hook set, goes to show you never know.

Tony had a big pike take a pass and missed the Rat’l Trap. The walleyes were thick and active. Walleyes are great fun on crank baits and Jerk Baits. Wind is huge for all day action, if you don’t have wind fish the early morning hours and evenings with artificial baits.

We lot our wind totally. We went jigging with minnows in the current and caught more walleyes that were legal to keep for dinner.