Babe Winkleman on Fishing Glacial Lakes

KBJR - May 13, 2000 -- Many northern Minnesota lakes lie within the Canadian Shield. They're cooler, glacial lakes lined by thick bedrock, and they don't offer an overabundance of food or cover for fish -- but professional fisherman Babe Winkelman said some of the shield lakes can yield nice walleye.

"Rainy [Lake], on the Minnesota-Ontario border -- they put good regulations on there several years ago. Conservation regulations, if you will, and the walleye fishing up there right now is absolutely phenomenal," Winkelman told News 6 outdoors reporter Craig Zlimen.

Winkelman said his strategies for finding and attracting fish on shield lakes are the same as on other lakes: experimentation and a willingness to move around.

Anglers in stained water "should look at fluorescent red or fluorescent orange or a fluorescent lime green," which are easier for fish to see, Winkelman said.

"You're looking for an area of the lake holding fish, so you're looking as quickly as you can and you're looking for a reaction," Winkelman said. "Once you get a reaction, now you're looking to find the fish in that area."

"I think that if [anglers are] on an area where they're not catching them, haul the mail out of there and don't spend too much time on one spot. Even if it was a good spot in the past, if it's not right now, at the time you're fishing it, you need to go somewhere else."

"The people who are going to be the most successful this opener are the people who are every opener, and those are the people that learn how to hunt fish."

Winkelman told Zlimen anglers hunting trophy walleye should know about Elephant Lake, near Orr, and the potential effectiveness of burning a little midnight oil.

"Up by Orr is a lake called Elephant Lake that folks should check out if they're looking for a sleeper lake with some pretty good fish," Winkelman said.

"Particularly around opening, the big fish are not going to be where the bulk of them are -- they're going to be off by themselves," he said. "I would highly consider doing a couple of things: first off, look at Lindy-rigging some fairly large minnows on steep rock breaks, breaks that break down to the bottom of the lake."

Winkelman also said wetting a line at night can be mighty effective. "I would consider definitely night fishing. Running big crank baits, big minnow baits over the flats. I would also look ... in very clear water, doing so on planer boards and not dragging it behind the boat. Walleye are very skittish -- they're the most skittish fish we have in Minnesota. That's just the nature of them."

"Just using a treble hook and some beads, with maybe a No. 5 to a No. 7 blade, just a big blade, just kinda like a spinner harness, and put a gob of crawlers on the back and troll it right under the surface under a planer board slow enough so it just kinda rolls. There's some times at night that that can just turn those big walleyes on. They come into vibration when they can't use eyesight a lot, so whatever you're going to use at night ought to have some element of vibration to it."