Please recommend a lake

[welkins1]

Sorry I took so long. I used a soft side cooler and checked it. I have also flown back from Canada and checked big coolers with ducks and geese. It's no problem flying with game and firearms as long as you check them and declare them as required. They are subject to inspection just like anything else. Let me know where you go and how you do

[GraniteStater]

How is Leech Lake these days?

[80skeys]

Originally Posted by welkins1

Sorry I took so long. I used a soft side cooler and checked it. I have also flown back from Canada and checked big coolers with ducks and geese. It's no problem flying with game and firearms as long as you check them and declare them as required. They are subject to inspection just like anything else. Let me know where you go and how you do

Thanks for the tips. I don't have firm plans yet, but we're planning on going in August and probably will stay at one of the smaller lakes (1,000 - 2,000 acres) in the Brainerd area.

[80skeys]

Hello everyone.

I am following up on my own thread. I ended up going to the Aitkin area this month, renting a cabin for five days on a medium sized lake, and it was a very pleasant, enjoyable experience. The weather was nice except for one of the days when it rained hard. The scenery was fantastic and the fishing was good. We ended up catching nice sized walleyes which was cool because we didn't have any prior experience with that fish. As it turns out, the way we figured it out was to locate a spot on the lake with about 25' depth and a sandy bottom, park the boat, drop a night crawler to the bottom and reel it in really slowly. That did the trick as far as the walleye.

We also caught bass, perch, and pike, sizes ranging from tiny to large. One of the pike was about 27" (large in my book) and one of the bass was about 4-5 lbs. Plus medium sized fish. Again, good sized fish in my book because I'm used to trout fishing which generally produces much smaller fish.

All in all, good fishing. The cabin rental included the fishing boat with motor (9lb) and gas. The boat was just fine for the size lake and fine for most of the weather conditions except for a couple days that saw some brief periods of wind with whitecaps on the water.

Reall nice landscape: green, lots of trees. No mosquitos! I guess they die off by the time August rolls around. Also saw a couple bald eagles that live on the lake. Interestingly, one of the afternoons, as we were cruising around the shoreline, there was a large bald eagle on someone's lawn - it was just sitting on the lawn pecking at worms.

I don't know what Minnesota is like at other times of the year, but seems to me like August and September are glorious months to visit. I thoroughly enjoyed the visit and I hope I have the chance to go back someday.