I have been hearing a lot of great reports about the fishing in the South Dakota prairie lakes in the Webster area, lakes like Waubay, Enemy Swim & Bitter Lake. I finally pulled the trigger and made the road trip from the Twin Cities out to Webster this past weekend. Before we left the Twin Cities I reached out to Quintin Biermann who lives in the Webster area. Quintin was super happy to talk about the fishing in the area, what has been working, what was hot, what is not. Clearly Quintin has a passion for the outdoors. He knows the area and was more than willing to put us on the spot-on-the-spot. Although Quintin was out of town, he kept in continued contact, by cell, with us over the weekend, checking to see how we were doing and suggesting alternative locations when things inevitably slowed.
For me, crossing over the border into SD is a calming event. I am sure it has a lot to do with being away from the stresses of work and home. Maybe you can relate to the feeling of how great it is to be out on the prairie. I love the long views and the awesome sunrises & sunsets.
South Dakota has some much to offer an outdoorsman. I have been on some fantastic pheasant and duck hunts in SD. And a few years back we went on a series of spring turkey hunts on the Sisseton Reservation. I have a lot of great memories of turkey hunting in the Sisseton area with my son. We call those trips “Fun with Trucks & Guns”. But that is another story.
This trip revealed yet another great resource that SD has to offer, fishing. Everyone in our small group was amazed at the amount of water, so many different places to fish, the number of different species, the size & quantity of fish. We caught some really nice fish. And we caught a lot of fish, including good numbers of pike and walleye! My brother Joe caught a 36″ pike (a personal best), my largest walleye was a beautiful 26″ walleye. The pike and walleye came off Bitter Lake and the smallie came off Waubay.
On our way home on Sunday we opted to fish Big Stone Lake. There were 25 trailers at the landing, so we knew that something was up. One of the locals approached us as we were about to launch and protested that the perch were not biting, “you should have been here 2 weeks ago”. We launch anyway. The wind was a real challenge. Once we were on the water we did not have to go far to find a half dozen boats stacked up on a point in 6 FOW.
It did not look like anyone was catching fish so was looked around with side & down imaging and found some rocks and weed growth, clumps really, they came all the way up to the surface in 6 FOW and were only about 2 or 3 feet in diameter. Those weed clumps were scattered around the area we fished. We thought that the rocks and weed clumps looked like good structure and anchored up to bobber fish (everyone else was jigging). We used 1/16th oz. panfish jigs with crappie type tube baits and tipped them with a minnow head or maggots. I found perch in the first 2 minutes. The key was to have the bait sitting on the bottom. If the bait was 6 inches or more off the bottom you would not get a bite. That might be why all the boats that ended up anchoring near us did not catch fish, and eventually left. I assume that the 2 foot waves gave the jig movement under my bobber. We had consistent action all afternoon. When we pulled the anchors at 4:00PM, we were the only boat in sight on the water. We had fished from 12:00 – 4:00PM.
I cannot wait to go back.
