My Dad, Son and Step-Brother Dave and I took our fourth trip to Devils Lake June 27 – July 3. It was utterly amazing to see how much the lake has changed in a year. You can see how much the lake has come up by the two different shots of a friends boat launch area. From what I gather in talking to the people around the lake if it comes up a few more feet it will run over into the Sheyenne river and that is only going to add to the woes of the folks who live along the Red river. The roads were brutal, roads like highway 19 and the road down to the Casino out of Dl were under construction and a muddy, dusty, rough mess. The weather was crazy in terms of the swings in temperature. One day I went from wishing I hadn’t forgotten a stocking cap to stripping down to a t shirt and shorts. Not a pretty picture so far but the fishing did not disappoint us.
Most days Dad and Dave spent the bulk of their time slip bobbering the trees. This bite seemed to be more hit and miss than years past except for the evening bite. Overall the fish seemed smaller on average but very aggressive once the sun started going down. Mitch and I split our time between the bobbers (usually two to three hours an evening) and casting crankbaits and mimic minnows around cover or along weedlines pursuing walleye and pike. It seemed like the old standbys didn’t produce like last year until the last couple of days and the heat resulted in an algae bloom cutting visibility and the then the jointed shad raps and mimic minnows started to produce like usual.
Mitch and I had four days where we boated over 100 walleyes and 2 days where we had at least 50 pike. While casting Mitch and I had our best luck using clackin raps in the wind blow shore/weedlines. Mitch pulled out some goofy swim bait that looked similar to a paddle tail and was about six inches long and rigged weedless and would pitch that way into the bulrushes and pulled out some nice pike and walleye. I tried using a bass swim jig tipped with a white twister and pitched it into the thick cover and pulled out my share of the walleye and pike too. We called it slop fishing for snot rockets since most of the fish caught throwing into the thick stuff were 20-24” pike. Clackin Raps produced the two biggest fish of the trip a walleye just over 24” and a pike just a hair over 43”. The pike were more aggressive than years past and we only caught 4 whitebass for the whole week which is very unusual for us. Many of our old reliable areas from the past couple of areas where no longer producing so we covered a fair amount of water though I didn’t get up to Pelican Lake as I had hoped to. The bridges didn’t have enough room under them to permit me to try it and the roads were more ugly than I cared to trailer my boat over.
I look forward to my next trip out to DL. Even though the roads are brutal the people and the fishing more than made up for it.
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