I had the pleasure of staying at the south end of Pepin last weekend at Camp LaCupolis. What a great place! The cabins were pleasant and the owner, Bea, is a tremendous lady, always out to please. Hopefully, we can get her enrolled here on ftr and get some regular reports from the southern end of the lake.
The fishing was awful slow this weekend. The wind kept trolling difficult and it did get a little bit cool on Saturday, but we did manage to see a couple of fish caught on jigs right around the corner from the LaCupolis harbor. The rocky banks drop steeply down to 20 – 50 feet around there and the fish do tend to hang off the edge.
Sunday, I went out early and had beautiful, cool, calm waters to keep me busy. The current is still really moving in that area, and the fish seem to be really scattered. It was a tough bite again and during the early morning hours, I didn’t see a single fish caught, although a few boats had some stringers out with one or two on them.
I tried casting a # Perch Rapala to shore for awhile and managed a short bite that was sort of lazy. Went to three-ways with a worm in 8 – 24 feet and couldn’t seem to scare anything up. I was trolling upriver most of the time, hoping that a really slow troll would put my worm in front of one or two fish, but the walleyes just didn’t seem to cooperate.
I also tied on a silver Rapala for awhile. Other boats were jigging and most hugged the shallow points at around 20 feet, but I didn’t see a lot of waving nets.
The attached fish is the biggest I saw this weekend. I promised Dave Klein, who nailed this 5-pounder, that I’d make him famous if he’d let me get a picture. He smiled and told me that it would be great. So here he is. He was jigging with a minnow and said that the bite was hard and fast. She just didn’t want to let go.
One other little comment. I did a little searching in the main channel at around forty feet and ran into absolutely tons of fish sitting down on the bottom. They were stacked in huge numbers all over the bottom and didn’t seem to be in any hurry to bite. I don’t know if they’ve fed and are going to winter homes or not, but the bites that I did get were slow and lazy, like they just didn’t really need food at the time. Seems like there are a lot of saugers sitting down there right now, though. Maybe after the lake freezes, someone can go haul out a few!
Mike