3rd weekend filshing report from the Ely area

[greatoutdoors]

White Iron Chain: Still getting large northern by Silver Rapids Lodge with minnows, walleye fishing slow, nice crappies hitting on Garden Lake. Shagawa Lake is producing large smallmouth, small walleye-few and far between. Snowbank Lake reports slow trout fishing, walleyes and bass being caught in 6-12 FOW. Surface temp around 53 degrees. Burntside Lake surface temp 54-55 degrees, a few walleye being caught in 12 feet, trout fishing slow.
Looks as though the weather will stabilize in the next couple of days, which should put the fishing in a more predictable pattern by next weekend.

[JackpineRob]

Conditions are a bit strange calendar-wise right now.  We discovered leeches were preferred over rainbow chubs by a healthy 3 or 4 to 1 ratio.  Given the water temps, I thought this was perhaps one of those fluke things until my son commented on the volume of stoneflies around the moving water.  Over the years I have relied on the lake shiner run and the first major stonefly hatch as indicators of when I can just leave the minnows home. 

Next week, no minnows for this guy (unless we decide to grab a few heavy pike suckers for some haukki entertainment).

With the snotty weather on Saturday and Sunday, few fishermen were out and about.  We went out for a bit of evening fishing Saturday and ended up keeping a dozen decent eaters in less than an hour.  We were fishing shallow current with leeches and minnows. 

Sunday afternoon Jr. and I headed out to explore a little bit, and picked up 7 eaters in short order.  The fish were in less than 6 feet of water and we cast at them with 1/8 oz jigs tipped with a leech.  We quit early to get back and fire up the deep fryer for some serious beer-batter action.

When the skies cleared and the air dried out Sunday evening, the lake came alive with boats and fishermen.  Why they all popped out to fish the high pressure is one of those little mysteries I may never quite solve.