Lake of the Woods/NW Angle report

Lake of the Woods. No finer place to take long snowmobile rides with Otters in tow, meet with friends, fish hard and try to break stuff.

This year was no different. A group of four of us met up for four days of pure bliss, and our target this year was to fish the area of the NW Angle and stay at a friend’s cabin. Two groups of us met up at the Garden Island shelter after a nice ride from Baudette. This is where we read a notebook of stories and a recent story of a person who was traveling on a mission to break stuff, and they had some miles to go. You had to be there to find it’s humor, and we hoped it wasn’t going to happen to us.

After settling in, we headed out to do a little fishing for the afternoon and evening. About 400 yards from our GPS location I picked out, my auger was on a friend’s snowmobile rack and a weld broke that sent my Strikemaster Lazer tumbling at a high rate of speed. No damage, but some snow obviously filled the engine compartment.

I drilled two holes for the Otter, and started to drill several holes over the area of structure when the auger passed out and died. After trying to repair it, it was a no go. We were forced to fish from 4 holes for two of us, while my other friend’s were a short distance away. I placed the auger in front of the heater and hoped for the best.

We dropped our lines and a short time later…my friend Josh lands our first fish of the day from inside the Lodge. One dandy 29″!

Things are looking good, and we are now catching some fish. The fact that my auger wasn’t working got to me, so after some minor repair and heat it fired back up and we were back in business. We drilled more holes, moved a little deeper and before you knew it we had a pile of fish on the ice for the four of us.

Over the next few days our group split up while two guys fished Canada while Josh and I racked on the miles on the sleds scouting all sorts of reefs, flats, shallows and deep in MN waters. Overall, we found a lot of fish absent from areas that looked so good. We found some action deeper during mid-day on far edges of structure that flattened out off of reefs, and away from the crowds.

But, in the late afternoon we always found ourselves returning to that one spot that produced so much fish day after day in 15-20′ of water over soft bottom. We averaged 40 fish a day from that unique spot.

Over the course of our trip our best day was our first day and the fish wanted noise and glow. Two of our days the fish wanted flashy gold lures, and our favorites was the Custom Jigs and Spins Slender spoons and also the Angel Eye Jr’s. And, again, we concentrated mostly on shallow mud-like bottom to find active fish. We hardly found fish on the rocks, anywhere, even on our return trip home.

And, to top the trip off and finish our mission to “break stuff” we had a snowmobile down for the count a few miles from our destination; however no broken rods, tackle and the Otter survived another year with 150 miles of Lake of the Woods under it’s belt.