I
had the pleasure of guiding Darv and Marcia Habben and their tow grandsons
Payton and Payne. We met at the Thunderbird Lodge for breakfast and headed up
the lake about 8:30 AM for some walleye fishing and a traditional Rainy Lake shorelunch.
I
opted to try an island instead of a reef.
We looked along the break line and found a nice school of fish. We baited our jigs with a half a crawler and
dropped them down. It took the boys less than a minute to hook up with
walleyes. We had absolute mayhem for an hour and one half.
Marcia
set the hook on a fish but it looked like she was snagged. I took the rod to
get the snag out and all of the sudden the drag started going out with
something very heavy. Marcia fought the fish and then it came up easy. Marcia
has a nice 16 and ½” walleye that was just plain mangled. A huge northern pike
had grabbed it right after setting the hook. The walleyes slowed and scattered
after the pike showed up. It was time for shorelunch anyway.
We
went to Virgin Island and had a nice shorelunch at one of the many tent camping
sites created by the Voyageur National Park maintenance staff. After shorelunch we headed back for more
fishing, this time on a reef. Walleyes were snapping again. We fished until we
had a nice limit of fish to go back to the lodge.
It
is so nice to see grandpa and grandma taking the grandkids fishing.
