It was 15-degrees below zero about mid-morning on February 8 near the eastern shore of 200-square mile Mille Lacs Lake in frosty Minnesota, located east of Brainerd. Danny Thompson grew up ice fishing in Minnesota and he and a buddy decided to wait until the sun was well up before heading out onto the 2 feet of ice.
“My good friend Derik Walcheski and I had another buddy show us a good sand-mud transition area for perch fishing that morning,” Thompson, 37, tells Outdoor Life. “We drilled holes through the ice there and were excited to get in on the great perch fishing going on Mille Lacs now.”
They each had a separate portable ice shelter that they set up well apart to try different areas. Thompson, who works for Garmin, said he drilled two holes that morning under his tent: one for his Garmin sonar and another nearby hole to jig for perch.
“I was over about 30 feet of water and used a small spinning rod with 6-pound test line,” says Thompson, a resident of Andover. “Mille Lacs is jammed with huge numbers of small walleyes now. So I didn’t use bait, just a Northland chartreuse spoon.”
Thompson was fishing the Northland Buck-Shot Rattle spoon in super-glo exo chartreuse. Even with the spoons and no bait, Thompson says the little undersize lake walleyes can get in the way of catching perch. He says using his Garmin PS22 sonar allowed him to “see” when smaller walleyes were near, or if they were larger perch.
“When little walleyes showed I’d drop my spoon to the bottom and rest it idle until they passed, so I didn’t catch them,” he explained. “Every few minutes a pod of three or four bigger yellow perch would show on my screen and I’d bring my ice spoon up just a bit above the fish, usually 2 to 6 feet off bottom.
“Those perch are real aggressive and come to a spoon fast. I’d catch a couple perch, then drop my spoon back to the bottom and wait on more perch to arrive.”
Thompson already had caught several nice perch in the 11-to-13-inch range, and he’d just dropped his spoon back to the bottom when another school of perch showed on his sonar.
Read Next: The Best Ice Fishing Lures for Perch
“On the sonar I could tell that one of the fish was a little bigger than the others, and I hooked it,” he says. “It was strong and took a while to get it up to the hole. When I did, and I got a look at it, I got excited because it was huge.”
As he worked the fish up out of the ice, his spoon pulled out of the perch’s mouth and the fish in danger of sinking back through the hole.
“But it was so long and fat it couldn’t get turned around and drop back down the hole before I grabbed it and pulled it onto the ice,” Thompson says. “That’s when I realized how big a perch it was. It’s easily the biggest one I’ve ever caught – and I’ve been fishing for them since I was a little kid on Lake of the Woods, and on Mille Lacs for nearly 20 years.”
Thompson didn’t have a scale with him, but his jumbo perch measured 14.75 inches in length and had a huge belly.
“That perch’s fillets were as big as the one walleye I kept that day, and the walleye was about 3.5 pounds. That was one heck of perch, and I’m sure there are other big ones being caught from the lake right now.
Read Next: ‘Big as a Yellow Submarine.’ Yellow Perch Caught in the Tidewater Breaks 46-Year-Old Maryland Record
“This is a boom year for Mille Lacs Lake yellow perch. And the number of small walleyes in the lake now is incredible. That may bode well for great walleye fishing on the lake in a couple years.”
Read the full article here
