The Lake of the Woods Double Grand Slam

After lodge owner Gary Moeller had a really great trip to Anglers Inn last April, he invited us up to fish the waters of Ontario’s Lake of the Woods, at Ballard’s Black Island Lodge. Finally, Half Past First Cast was going NORTH of the border.

Our goal was to catch a new Grand Slam – walleye, musky, smallmouth and northern pike in a single day. While we never did it in one day, we did catch all four species and more. Here is a guide to what we caught:

Walleye (sander vitreus) – also known as yellow pike or yellow pickerel is a freshwater fish native to most of Canada and the Northern United States. Walleye avoid bright lights and feed in low light on fish that don’t see as well as they do.    

Our first stop was specifically made to catch our dinner. We stopped in open water that had rocks and boulders beneath to hold the walleye in the shade. We caught them on a ¼ oz jig head with a dead minnow as bait using spinning rods with eight-pound test line. We cast out no more than 10 feet from the boat and let it hit bottom. Once the bait hit bottom, in 10 to 20 feet of water, we would pop the jig or drag it and just about every cast you had a chance at a walleye…if the light-biters didn’t steal your minnow.

The first few we caught were so exciting, but when the guide threw them back in instead of keeping them for dinner, we gasped.

“Hey, don’t throw them back, we don’t want to go hungry!”

There is a limit of two per person and they must be between 12 and 18 inches so the little ones we released so they could grow. When Jennifer Combs caught a 26-incher, we measured, photographed and tossed it back as well.

While targeting walleye we also caught sauger (sander canadensis) and yellow perch (perca flavescens), which was very exciting as these are two new species for me (although Pete swears I’ve caught perch on the Potomac).  

Sauger look very much like a walleye. if I were out in the boat alone, I wouldn’t have known the difference. The sauger’s dorsal fins are marked by rows of dark and blotchy spots and don’t have the dark blotch on the rear of the dorsal fin or the white lower tail tip that the walleye has. Perhaps side by side you can tell but swinging it in the boat, I had no clue.

I wasn’t the one that caught the perch but I was the one that almost jumped in to get the one Pete caught and released without me getting a picture of it. It’s the little things that excited me and I really wanted a picture.  Then he jinxed us, “Don’t worry” he said, “we’ll catch another.”

As you can see, no picture!!

I guess perch wasn’t on the dinner menu?!?!

Crappie (pomoxix) – Crappie 1, Hanna 0 – no one can believe that I still haven’t caught a crappie, including me. There were four of us in the boat, three out of four caught more than one crappie, decent sized ones as well, and all I caught in that jigging spot was walleye. At least I knew I wouldn’t go hungry.

Crappie feed on smaller fish species. With all these types of fish in the lake, it’s no wonder crappie are very abundant and many anglers brought these tasty panfish back to be eaten or taken home -- just not me.

Now let’s get to the Grand Slam.

Northern Pike (esox lucius) – You can fish for pike in Britain, Ireland, most of Eastern Europe, the United States and of course Canada. They are most often found in shallow, clear lake waters that have weedy places and also around rocky structure. They lie near the bottom and wait for their prey and then they surprise attack out of nowhere.

Many troll for pike (and musky) but other than jigging for walleyes we did all of our fishing casting. The pike particularly liked the chatterbait with a single tail trailer, as did the smallmouth, which I will get to later in this blog.

Pike are toothy critters and many times will cut your line, mono, flouro or braid. You will need to check your line after every catch to make sure you don’t need to re-tie. If you miss one make sure you check your line for nicks --what you can’t see you may feel.

Once to the boat you want to make sure they are calm, tired out and hold them behind the lower jaw which helps open their mouth. Try to do all the hook removal in the water and once you take your picture give the pike time to recover before sending them off. This is all easier said than done. They are so spastic, they are slimy and smell terrible and those teeth are sharp and plentiful.

We caught several pike while we were targeting smallmouths as they live in the same rocky and weedy areas. Many were small to medium size but two were bigger than average.

I was throwing a Rapala SR07 Shad Rap Crankbait, in Crawdad, on a pre-1995 Bass Pro Shops Conservationist model, three piece, 6’ spinning travel rod, Pete’s first travel rod that cost a whopping $30 a LONG time ago. Although the rod was a hand-me-down, the reel, with 8-pound mono, was an Abu Garcia Zenon with a price tag of $550 (antique and modern, a designer’s best friend).

Apparently, the Shad Rap is the bait for walleye but the smallmouth and pike seem to like it just as much. I was catching smallmouth after smallmouth from a certain point and the next bite was quite different so I thought I had a real nice sized smallie….until it jumped. The pike jumped and took off for the back of the boat and then jumped again. Somehow my exceptional rod handling and our guide Reuben’s netting skills got my first pike, a 32-incher, in the boat for a picture.

Everything happens so fast, people trying to get out of my way, Reuben getting in close with the net, and then after pictures, washing the slimy stank off my hands, several high fives, time goes back a tickin’.

UNTIL TIME STOPS AGAIN. Jennifer got hit hard. Wherever she fishes she lives by the saying “everything is bigger in Texas” (where she is from) and this time it was true (except for the fact she was in Canada). She led a 41-inch trophy pike into the net. Meanwhile, up the lake, our friend John Ashford (sister Michelle’s husband) caught himself a 38-inch gator (another name for a pike).

What more could this lake bring us?

Well, I will tell you, Musky (esox masquinongy) – large freshwater fish of a thousand casts. Knowing what it took to catch a musky when we targeted them on Lake St. Clair, I was sure we wouldn’t catch any while on Lake of the Woods, although I was told we would be around them. I was also hoping that as many casts that I have made trying to hook a musky in Michigan in the past would counted towards this trips casts.

It took until the last afternoon of our last full day, but I did manage to catch a little musky. There’s no picture as it came off at the boat, but that fish was mine, all mine and my back-of-the-boat dance was a happy one.

Pete caught a small musky as well but Texas Jennifer caught the big one in our boat. I think we need to rethink this travel arrangement before our next trip, LOL.

Lisa Skelley caught the biggest musky of the trip while bank fishing at camp. We have video, thank you Michelle, and a lot of commotion as it just about swam up to the lodge but Gary Moeller was able to help get it to quick release, perhaps not what Lisa wanted but what she got. Gary said it was “THISSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS big” (with his arms spread wide), he was shocked.

Moral of the musky story: Don’t fish for musky and you will catch one.

Although most of us had caught smallmouth and largemouth bass before we were all excited to see how the Lake of the Woods bass behaved.

We all know about largemouth bass (micropterus salmoides) from all of our Mexico trips and fishing in our home states, so I won’t go into much detail. Just know that they are freshwater gamefish that are indigenous to United States, Northern Mexico and Southeastern Canada.

The upper jaw extends beyond the fishes eye and have almost black looking blotches that form a stripe going down each side of the fish to the tail.

We weren’t there to catch largies. It really didn’t matter if we caught one or not but you would never have known that when Jennifer (of course) caught one from a likely smallie spot. It didn’t matter that it was only around a pound – we still had to have a photo session. Then me and Pete kind of wanted to catch one too, but we were stuck on brown, not green.

Smallmouth bass (micropterus dolomieu) were the real reason we came to Lake of the Woods. The jaw of the smallmouth doesn’t extend past the eyes like that of the largemouth bass. They have two dorsal fins, unlike the largemouth’s one, and their coloration is an olive to dark brown with deep brown bars that are all over their body. It reminds me of a giraffe’s coloring (I was told I was crazy; you be the judge).

After our first day on water, with the morning being spent catching dinner and the afternoon taken to offshore spots to catch various kinds of fish we decided to explore the waters around Black Island on our own after dinner.

Pete and I went one way, Jennifer and Lisa went another and upon our return we learned that Jennifer got on a Chatterbait bite. Well, we really need to thank Jennifer, because the next two days the majority of our fish were caught on various kinds of vibrating jig – especially if it had white and some chartreuse on the skirt and a white trailer. Our best trailers includes a Strike King Rage Swimmer, Zoom Super Fluke and a Zoom Ultra Vibe Speed Craw.

We didn’t expect this to be our primary lure, so of course we didn’t bring enough, especially since we thought for sure they would eat spinnerbaits and swim jigs at least as well, if not better. Our best spots were rocky points that had grass, where the water was clearer and didn’t have a much algae on top. A lone boulder or an old fallen tree just sweetened it up.

The second day out our best five smallmouth went 21 pounds which was a nice bag for Lake of the Woods.

As we headed out on our last day on the water, Reuben said he expected at least 21 pounds by 10:00 am, and he giggled. No pressure, as we didn’t think there was any chance that would happen again.

UNTIL IT DID. In fact, we hit the mark by 9:30 am. That’s right, somehow, we came across between 24 and 25 pounds in our best five fish. Reuben, who was a man of few words and incredibly quiet when he did speak, couldn’t stop adding up weights, measuring the fish from the live well and saying he just couldn’t believe how this could be.

My first three fish of the day each weighed over 5 pounds. It just didn’t seem real. Pete and Jennifer got pretty quiet and then I felt like I should step aside until Pete caught something heavy, we assumed a pike and then yet again, another 5-pound smallmouth. Thankfully, Jennifer rounded our out bag otherwise we may have had to take her back to the lodge. Even on vacation the three of us are competitive AF.

The livewell video and the pictures tell it all. I am not sure how we will ever relive this day, although I’d like to try.

The afternoon brought me another 5-pounder (that’s right four 5+-pound smallmouth bass for this girl) and finally my baby musky.

So, there you have it, eight species of fish, some trophy size, some football size, some first time ever species caught and, not on the same day, but who’s that technical? Another Grand Slam in the books for five out of the seven anglers in our group. I’d call that a tremendous success for our first time there.