Ice Fishing Mille Lacs 2017

Ice-fishing was good for me this year. I made a couple day trips to Mille Lacs with some friends and had some of the best ice-fishing I’ve ever had.

This was the first year I have ever fished Mille Lacs, but it definitely won’t be the last. We had a great day catching tullibee and walleye throughout the day. Often tullibee are mistaken for whitefish, you can learn the difference between the two here. I had never caught tullibee before, but they are an absolute blast to catch. They school like crappies, but chase like lake trout sometimes following your lure all the way to a few feet under the ice. Towards the end of the night the walleye bite really picked up. We set up a few tip-ups to cover a larger variety of depths. If you are new to tip-up fishing I have a great way to rig tip-ups for targeting multiple species. I could explain further on the tip-up walleye bite, or you could watch the following video and see for yourself.

My very next trip to Mille Lacs after catching my personal best 26” walleye I end up beating my previous record by catching a 27” lunker of a walleye. Again this walleye hit late a night. I was on my way to pull my last tip-up (that hadn’t popped all day) and saw the flag was popped. It was spinning but when I grabbed it and set the hook there was only a few feet of line taken, so that fish had just bit right when I was walking over.