Bill Marchel: Large lake's largemouths draw only a tiny crowd

MILLE LACS LAKE — Until Monday, I had caught a total of three largemouth bass in Lake Mille Lacs. All of those bass had grabbed outsized lures thrown for muskies a decade or so ago when I fished almost exclusively for the toothy monsters.

Obviously Mille Lacs is best known for its healthy population of walleyes. The big lake is also renowned for its excellent smallmouth bass fishery. A strict limit has been placed on Mille Lacs Lake's smallmouth bass that allows anglers to keep only one fish over 21 inches.

But on Monday, it was the little-fished-for largemouth bass that attracted Lindy Frasl of Fort Ripley and me to Mille Lacs. Neither of us had ever fished for largemouth on the sprawling lake so we were anxious to test our fish-finding skills on "new" waters.

Not long after sunrise we launched Lindy's Skeeter bass boat. The glossy boat outfitted with a powerful 200-horsepower outboard is just the ticket for plying massive Mille Lacs. One can quickly and comfortably get wherever one wants to go.

Already the wind was gusting from the southwest. White-capped waves are the norm for Mille Lacs since the wind and water have nearly 20 miles of wide open space in which to gain strength.

Walleye anglers with an eye toward the midlake mud flats might fail to notice the expansive stands of bulrushes, cattails and reeds that run for hundreds of yards along much of the Mille Lacs shoreline. It was those emergent weed beds that Lindy and I decided would be our targets for attempting to find largemouth bass.

As we shoved off from the landing we glanced up and down the shoreline.

"Let's go to the left," Lindy said. "But that looks good over there, too," as he pointed to the right.

Minutes into the day Lindy boated the first bass, a chunky fish about 12 inches long. "Chunky" is a word many bass anglers use to describe a bass that is thick for its length. Immediately upon seeing the bass Lindy and I both commented on the thickness of the little fish. Moments later he caught another similarly sized largemouth. Then it was my turn. Within the first few minutes we had boated four bass. These fish fell for tube jigs and craw-tubes rigged Texas style.

After that the action slowed for a few minutes. I grabbed a different fishing rod rigged with a floating frog imitation before chucking the lure to a small inlet in the outside edge of a thick stand of bulrushes. A bass blasted the lure immediately when it hit the water but missed. Subsequent casts to the spot failed to entice the fish to hit again.

When Lindy pitched a jig to the spot, the bass inhaled his offering. The fish was pushing 3 pounds. Again we commented on how "chunky" the fish appeared.

As the morning progressed, the wind increased. We fished primarily along the outside edges of sprawling bulrush stands. Lindy operated the boat using a foot-controlled trolling motor -- as most bass anglers do. Boat control is an art -- especially in a gusty wind -- and often taken for granted by the passenger, in this case me. Lindy kept his boat positioned the perfect distance from the bulrush stands; not too close so as to spook the fish, not too far to cast to.

As Lindy angled his boat toward the landing, I realized we had seen not another angler who appeared to be fishing for largemouth bass. Perhaps, I thought, the lowly carp -- big, ugly and plentiful in this lake -- are a more attention-grabbing fish than the little-sought largemouth, never forgetting the much-ballyhooed walleye.