Long Lake

The story of Long Lake by Willmar is an interesting one. I remember fishing there as a kid with my mom, dad, and brother. We fished for walleyes (that was all my dad fished for at the time) along with many other boats. From what I remember everyone was very successful. Then the walleyes were gone. Some people thought the lake froze out and many people said the cormorants ate them all, but after that nobody fished the lake anymore. About 10-12 years ago one of my best friends and frequent fishing partner, Lafe Swalin, decided to go out to the lake on an early spring day to put up a duck blind. After building the blind he climbed up in it and looked into the water. He was amazed at what he saw. There were giant bass on beds everywhere he looked. That first spring he caught 2 over 7 lbs along with numerous others over 6 lbs. My best day was 4 fish over 5 lbs and another 6 over 4 1/2 lbs. I also put several over 6 lbs in the boat on various occasions. He had discovered a honey hole basically in our backyard and nobody else knew about it. We obviously tried to keep it to ourselves as best we could but over time word started to get out. Our bass club began holding state qualifier tournaments on the lake and the Kandi Lakes Bass League began fishing there several times a year. The fishing was amazing but with the pressure the lake began to go downhill. It has never again been the same as those first couple years when we were the only people fishing it. However having said that, it is still an amazing fishery. The Midwest Sportsman circuit visited the lake in 2006 and 2007 and the winning weight for a 5 fish limit was still over 20 lbs each time.

Like I said in my previous post I didn't plan to do a lot of fishing today. I mostly wanted to cruise the spawning areas to see what was down there. Unfortunately the conditions today were not conducive to looking. There were high winds and cloud cover much of the day. The water temp was only 59 degrees as well. I made my way to some protected areas and started cruising. It was extremely difficult to see but I did find a few small fish on beds. I didn't fish for any but they seemed like they would have been easy to catch. They were pretty much locked on the beds. I was only seeing small ones though so I made my way out deeper and found a huge dark spot. I couldn't really see anything but when I got right on top of it a dark shadow moved off to the side. I'm guessing that was a 5+ pounder.

After checking out all the calm water I headed out into the wind with a Shad Rap and Strike King spinnerbait for just a few casts looking for a northern or walleye. I managed to catch a small northern and a small bass. Then just a few feet down from the northern I caught a real nice bass. It went 4.91 lbs on my scale. Thats the biggest bass I've caught on Long in over a year. Hopefully I can find a few more like that when our bass club visits the lake on May 31st. I have a feeling its going to take a big weight to win it.