I recently made the seven-hour drive to Upper Red Lake in Minnesota. I figured this was about the 15th time I had made this annual trip to the best walleye fishing in North America. It is a father-son experience I cherish.
For those of you who can remember back that far, the walleye fishing on Upper Red Lake collapsed from overnetting and to some extent overfishing by anglers back in about 2000.
Anglers get to fish only about 25 percent of this giant lake. The rest is off limits to all but tribal members. When the walleye fishing crashed, it turned into the best crappie fishing on the continent for about five years until the walleyes were restored by stocking efforts.
I was told by a fisheries expert that the largest windswept shallow basins in the state produce the greatest numbers of walleyes annually.
Upper Red Lake is huge and has an average depth of only 15 feet. We fished this basin 2 1/2 days and did so during the week. The reason I will only fish this lake during the week is because so many other folks know how good it is and go there, too.
On Wednesday, Thursday and Friday I could easily count 45-65 boats within 1 mile in each direction. On the weekends this can easily be 300-400 boats in the same space.
We leave early on Wednesday and fish that afternoon and the next two days and leave on Saturday morning as soon as we can get packed out.
I stay at West Wind Resort in Washkish, Minnesota, and with the fee to stay, the cost to rent an additional boat for my son-in-law and his dad, along with bait, groceries and gas, the entire trip costs each participant about $300. This is dirt-cheap compared to some of the other options.
We bought a fish counter for each boat and kept track of the number of fish we caught each day. We had a small bet for the biggest walleye, biggest northern pike and the biggest sheep head for each day. I broke about even.
The fishing here can just blow you away. The average angler in Minnesota catches .7 walleyes per outing. On Friday one boat with six anglers caught 118 fish, and my boat with three anglers caught 56.
Almost all of the fish caught were pretty small. Pretty small to me is 13 inches or less. We kept our three fish per person per day but had to go through lots of smaller fish to find a few over 15 inches.
We were fishing with jigs and minnows and almost every fish we caught was hooked in the roof of the mouth and was easily released without harm.
If we did deep hook one that would die if released, we kept it and cleaned it as part of our daily limit.
On Red the limit is three fish per day with only one of those over 17 inches in length. The possession limit is also three fish.
This means if you catch three on Wednesday, you need to eat those three before you can catch three on Thursday. We did not eat the larger fish we caught so we could not possess the full three-fish limit the following day. On the last day, seven fishermen could only keep 13 in order to stay within the law.
There are very few places where you catch a fish on almost every cast, but Upper Red is one of those places. It is managed well and the limits and length regulations change almost every year.
A large portion of the year’s walleye take happens in the winter when there can easily be 5,000 fish houses on the lake. This number can double when the bite is hot.
By the middle of June, the angling pressure decreases dramatically. The fish spread out and are harder to find and convince to bite.
Fresh fish and time with family and close friends are among the best reasons to go fishing. If I catch a lot or only a few, my outdoor memory is still a great one.
Scott Rall, Worthington, is a habitat conservationist, avid hunting and fishing enthusiast and is president of Nobles County Pheasants Forever. He can be reached at scottarall@gmail.com. or on Twitter @habitat champion.