ON LAKE MILLE LACS – Mike Lencowski has been baiting hooks with leeches for so many summers he could do it sleepwalking.
Also while asleep he probably could position a slip bobber on an angler's fishing line so the leech dangles just so near the bottom of this giant lake, increasing its chance of being inhaled by a walleye.
But Lencowski wasn't asleep the other morning. Far from it.
As a launch (definition: "big boat") captain and fishing guide working for Twin Pines Resort, Motel and Restaurant on Mille Lacs, he was either moving his 46-foot craft to a mud flat or submerged rock pile, dropping an anchor — or impaling leeches on hooks before instructing his 15 or so angler-passengers to "drop them in the water."
None of Lencowski's charges fished with their own equipment. Why should they? Included in the $35 adult admission price for a morning on Mille Lacs were rods, reels, hooks, lines and sinkers; the whole nine yards.
"All they need is a fishing license," Lencowski said.
A Minnesota tradition, Mille Lacs launch fishing is chugging along this summer amid the lake's toughest walleye-harvest restrictions in history.
Only walleyes between 19 and 21 inches can be kept, and the limit of these fish is one per angler — a far cry from the old days when boatloads of launch anglers returned to docks after four hours on Mille Lacs with two to four plump walleyes apiece in their possession.