Fishing action heating up

After a week of some of the worst fishing I’ve ever seen in my life down in Alabama, it was nice to be back at home in Northwestern Ontario to go fishing over the past week.
I was on the water a bunch, with a couple of guide trips, a couple of days filming new episodes of my TV program, “Fishing with Gussy,” and a couple of days fishing with friends.
I can tell you one thing: we are so lucky that we have such great fishing right across Sunset Country!
One of my guide trips last week was with a couple from Manitoba that was really fun. For the wife’s 30th birthday, her husband got her a fishing trip for the day and she wanted to go musky fishing.
We had a great time in the boat and while we only caught one musky, we did get a few “follows” from some nice fish to keep us interested.
We fished the central section of Lake of the Woods and all of the fish we saw were hanging around weed beds growing on sand and boulder shorelines. As long as the weather stays warm, keep the weed beds in mind (muskies will patrol their edges and pick off fish that swim by).
We caught our fish on a large eight-inch swimbait and had the “follows” on a double-bladed bucktail.
Walleyes were the main focus of filming the TV shows last week and the fishing was really good—the best I’ve seen all season.
Dave Bennett, one of my good fishing buddies, won the Kenora Walleye Classic on Lake of the Woods earlier in July along with Dean Howard, so we filmed an episode showing the strategy they used to win that tournament.
We caught a bunch of fish so it was a fun day.
Then over the weekend, I did some more walleye fishing and had a couple of good dinners!
All of the fish we found were on humps or long points. Big pieces of structure were the best, but we did have to drive around on these spots looking with our electronics for groups of fish before we started fishing.
Once we found fish on the sonar, we caught a bunch of nice eater-sized fish, as well as several big ones that were released. It seems like the stable weather over the past week or so really has helped the bite to pick up.
We just used quarter-ounce jigs tipped with minnows or soft plastics to catch our fish—nothing fancy.
When Dave and I filmed the TV show, we exclusively used plastics that day and the hot bait was a three-inch Northland Impulse Smelt Minnow. With the soft plastic, you can jig and fish the bait a lot more aggressively than you can with live bait.
It’s all about generating a reaction strike, so you keep the bait moving a lot more so they have less opportunity to inspect it.
We did encounter some groups of fish that were tough to catch on the plastics. So when I went back a day later with my friends and we had some minnows, they were fairly easy to catch.
They may have bit the plastic better the next day, too. Who knows?
All of the fish we found were relatively shallow, as well (in the 18- to 25-foot range). So keep an open mind to try a little shallower than you normally might if you get out fishing in the next week or two.
This week, I’m headed down to Rainy Lake to film a couple of TV shows with Scott Martin. His TV show, “The Scott Martin Challenge,” is the most viewed bass fishing show in the U.S. so it will be fun to be his guest and show him around Rainy Lake for a few days.
Scott, from Clewiston, Fla., is the son of famous bass angler Roland Martin and he is one of the most successful anglers in the history of the FLW Tour.
Look for my report on the fishing in next week’s column.