Out in It: Red-eye trip to Red Lake pays off

Bouncing along the backroads of Mahtowa, I leaned hard into the glow of my headlights, seeing the fine line between dirt and marsh. My eyes strained and blurred searching for my turn. Cottontail rabbits and woodcock scattered upon my approach. Gravel crunched under my tires as I worked my way up my cousin Ben Nynas' driveway, a billion stars enveloping me from above. As I broke free from my Suburban, a chorus of frogs echoed through the darkness. It was late ... or was it early? Either way, we were bound for Red Lake.

The pull of the massive schools of post-spawn walleyes proved too much for the three of us. Ben, Jeff "Opie" Aho and I piled our gear high and pointed ourselves north. Adrenaline kept me from conking out on the ride up. Fishing stories and coffee flowed for three hours as we made our way to where the Tamarack River dumps into the massive expanse of Upper Red Lake.

We weaved our way between the red and green buoys marking our path onto the big lake. Mostly sand and muck and shallow, the entrance needs to be dredged every so often to keep the tourists from beaching themselves. We emerged from the last set of buoys and were greeted by an overcast sky and a healthy "walleye chop," mostly from the west.

My main focus was putting our first walleye in the boat, but quickly my attention turned to the parade of boats ducking and dodging through the buoys. They came two at a time, and five at a time, and 10 at a time, over and over, they just kept coming. The channel acted like the barrel of a shotgun, pressure building until boats exploded in all directions, scattering to all corners of the lake.

We drifted in the wind, bouncing along nicely, the water darkened from the sky above. We dragged jigs and minnows in 6- to 8-feet of water. Based on the cluster of boats within casting distance, everyone had a similar gameplan. Ben struck gold first, a nice eater walleye snapped up his jig and ended up in the livewell. The slot limit is four per person, and only one of those fish can be over 17 inches. We took care of our "overs" in short order and had the rest of the day to add our "unders" to the mix.

As the day marched on, the wind died down a bit, and the sky opened up. The sun forced us to fish a little farther away from the boat, but the results were the same: a steady stream of 14- to 20-inch walleyes. We moved around searching for a "secret spot," but as far as the eye could see countless boats worked the same break line in all directions.

On one of our final passes, I was focused on adding one more walleye to the tally when I heard somebody yell "they let anybody on this lake or what?" Thirty feet away was my brother, Bruce, in the back of a Lund. Hundreds of miles from home, we bumped into each other, neither one of us aware the other had made the trek. We laughed as we drifted away from each other, the mass of other boats swallowing up our short-lived conversation.

Shortly thereafter we pulled the plug on our day trip, squeezing between the green and red buoys, and made our way back to the landing following a steady progression of boats also calling it quits. We rolled back up Ben's driveway several hours later. We figured we drove for seven hours to fish for about nine hours. It seemed a little crazy, but all of us agreed, it was a day well spent.

Bret Baker is an award-winning outdoors columnist and lifetime resident of Cloquet. He is a proud husband, father, educator and outdoorsman. Email him at [email protected] with fishing questions or story ideas.

*********

Watch it

Check out some footage of Bret Baker's Red Lake trip on his Legacy Angling YouTube page at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJ7U7_jUrDo&t=7s or simply click on the video at PineKnotNews.com.