Upper Red Lake - Feb. 17-19, 2007 I'm not quite sure what to say here guys... Simply put, I think last weekend was THE BEST FISHING I HAVE EVER HAD ON URL!! Lots of folks online are complaining about the bite and not catching fish. Lots of folks are saying Red is not worth fishing. Lots of folks are saying its not like it used to be. I'm here to disagree! There is great fishing to be had but you may, err... WILL have to work for it, or just be the luckiest guy in the world. On last weekend's trip, FM ProStaffer Jeff Borchardt (Borch) was my guest at the ice shack. With my Slabfest II gathering coming up, we wanted to cover some water and try and find some fish to put some folks on next weekend. And we covered water, and we found fish! I jumped out of the truck and took off one direction with my Strikemaster. Borch headed the other direction with his Nilsmaster. We had about 50 holes cut in the ice before we even wet a line. When the rods did come out, the very first hole I checked with my Marcum had a fish in it! I dropped my search lure, a Go-Devil spoon tipped with a minnow head and nailed a fish right off the bat! Are you kidding me? First Hole! First Drop! First Crappie!

Beginner's luck did not exactly mean continued luck. That was the last crappie we caught for the next 2-3 hours. We moved from hole to hole fishing each hole about 5 minutes. If there were fish there, we caught them. Walleyes and perch were very aggressive as we moved around looking for crappies. Then it happened... Borch hit the GOLDMINE! I was about ready to move to a different area and walked over to see what Borch was doing. As I approached him, he was unhooking a crappie! He had the most excited look on his face as he said the crappies were stacked up under him. And he was not kidding. When I looked at his LX-5, there were 4-5 different, distinguishable fish on the locator. When he dropped his bait down, these crappies were not fooling around. It was a race to see who would eat first! They were flying up 4-6' above the bottom to eat his bait on the drop. Simply Unbelievable! Wanting to get in on this action, I ran back to the truck, grabbed my gear, and moved in on Borch. It was game on! We proceeded to catch crappie after crappie after crappie. There would then be a lull in the action and they would move back in and it would be chaos again! I've fished many lakes where you run into roaming & feeding crappies and thats what was happening. These crappies were up in the water column, 3-4' off the bottom and cruising. They had one thing on their mind and that was eating! Because of this, our tackle selection was waaaaaayyyy beyond ordinary for URL! What did we use for bait? 1 word.... PLASTICS!!!!!

The preferred plastic was a Berkley 2" Power Minnow rigged on a Little Atom Optic Jig. The crappies absolutely devoured this presentation! We also mixed it up a bit and caught them on CJ&S Ratsos (size 4) with no bait. We caught them on Little Atom Optic & Optic Stealth jigs rigged with Little Atom Nuggie plastics with no bait. And the lure that I'm still shocked about... Salmo Chubby Darter! We pulled a Chubby Darter out to see if the crappies would hit that and they did! Saturday was simply an amazing day! We left the ice early (before dark) worn out from augering holes and fishing outside in the elements. We ended up catching 42 crappies on Saturday, we kept 18 (short of a limit) and C&R'd another 24 along with a ton of walleyes and perch. The crappies were all running 14 to 14 1/2" long. We might have had 2 that were 14 3/4" but none around that 15" mark. The game plan on Sunday was to try and find some more areas that would be good locations for Slabfest II. We tried 2 different "general areas" and were getting worked over with maybe a walleye or two to show for our efforts. I really wanted to fish the area we fished previously, but we also wanted to find more fish for the Slabfest. It was tough, that is leaving a good bite to search for more fish. It finally got to the point where I wanted to try out yesterday's spot, and guess what? It produced again! The difference between Saturday and Sunday was wind direction. Saturday was a N/NW wind and Sunday was a hurricane force wind from the South. We didn't want to do it but we had to set up the Otter shack to escape the wind. Sitting in one spot definitely impacted our catch rate on Sunday. We had to wait for the schools of crappies to move under us rather than chasing them around. The bite also happened much later than Saturday, Sunday was a traditional sundown bite for some reason. When we decided to quit, we had iced another beautiful 18 slab crappies. All of them released to be caught again by the Slabfest folks... hopefully!

After punishing ourselves on Sunday, we went back to the exact same spot on Monday morning to hopefully finish off the trip with some fast paced action! And fast paced action it was! My first 4 drops all produced fish, although the wrong species - darn walleyes! Walleye #1 was about 14". Walleye #2 was about 16". Walleye #3 was about 18". Walleye #4 went 20". And Walleye #5 snapped me off!! Darn! How big was it? I don't know about you guys but four walleyes in less than 5 minutes is serious fun fishing!! I don't lose fish very often and I lost 3 on this trip, all very large fish. I'm positive one of them was a big pike as I did not have a chance against him. Ice in the line guides, frozen ice on my line, drag too tight. Snap! The other two had some very serious head shakes that stressed the 4lb line too much. After I recovered from my third break off of the trip, I got back in the game and the crappies started to bite, although very tentatively. We had to resort back to the traditional approach of a jig & minnow to entice a few biters. I still jigged my Power Minnow in one hole while my minnow did his thing in the other. Most of the fish were very finicky. Lots of lookers, a few biters, and a few kamikazees that flew after that Power Minnow. We iced another 10 crappies Monday morning, kept 4, and released the rest. I've got to tell ya... it was really hard to leave the lake on Monday. We ran into some of the most incredible fishing I have experienced in a long time. I think between the size and amount of walleyes we caught, and the aggressiveness and numbers of crappies, it was probably my best trip ever to URL in the winter. When I say ever, that is going back to the winter of 1999-2000 when I made my first trip up there.

I think the reason for our success was determination and hard work. We worked our butts off! We augered lots of holes, probably near 200 total for the weekend. We covered water! And we were rewarded with really aggressive fish. Thats the secret. You have to fish where the fish are and you have to be mobile to find them. When you find them, the reward is incredible! We also switched up our tackle to what I would consider non-traditional URL tackle. I bet 80% or more of our fish were caught with absolutely NO BAIT, just plastics. We adjusted our techniques to what we were seeing on the Marcum flashers. When they were aggressive, plastics ruled and allowed us to fish faster and more effeciently. When the bite slowed down, my hands got cold messing around with minnows and keeping bobbers from icing in the holes. The grand total was 70 crappies for 2 1/2 days fishing. 42 on Saturday, 18 on Sunday, and 10 on Monday morning. 18 total crappies were kept for dinner and the rest released to be caught again! I couldn't even tally a count for the walleyes. It was just as many if not more! By the way... Walleyes love plastics and Power Minnows too!