“Fish and Stay” on the Ice of Lake Of The Woods in Minnesota

Three buddies and I booked a trip to Lyon Sleepers, which is located at Lake of the Woods, MN. I have never taken an ice fishing trip like this at all and it seemed very interesting to me to say the least…72 hours of living on an ice covered lake and fishing. My buddies and I are hard core fisherman and we made it work well for us. We caught 202 saugers, 40 walleyes, 2 northern and 2 perch.

This lake is well known for its big walleyes and great sauger population. In MN, ( Lake of the Woods) you are only allowed to catch 4 walleyes a day and 4 saugers a day per person. We kept 20 to 25 fish a day to make our meal every night. These fish are not real big, but they do taste great.

The average size for the saugers were 9" to 13" and the walleyes were 12" to 16", so we kept the little ones for eaters. The slot size for walleyes is 19.5" to 28" and you can only keep one walleye over 28". Our biggest walleye was 22" and about 3 lbs. We had about 6 eyes in the 17" range and the rest were smaller. Tim, the owner had our ice shack over 25' FOW with a soft bottom.

The ice shacks are 10' wide and 20' long and are heated with propane. There were four bunk beds with a small stove for cooking, and this was ideal for what we were doing, a great setup and was a lot of fun.

(ice shack we stayed in on our trip)

(interior of the ice shack)

Ok now for the technical part of catching all these fish. YOU MUST HAVE A FLASHER OR SOME TYPE OF LOCATOR!!!!!!! These fish were tight to bottom and if you marked them, you would have to tease them. Twitch your jigging spoon, get there attention and start to lift your spoon off the bottom about a foot, and then they would slam it big time. Morning and late day worked the best for us. We were all using some type of jig that had some orange and gold to it and they were 1/8 oz to 3/16 oz, tip with only the head of the minnow. We did try with whole minnows, but did not fair well in that method.


I believe, if you are a hard core fisherman like us, this is the place to go. Here is Tim's web site, http://www.lyonsleepers.com/overview.html.  Check him out and I would highly recommend his guide service.

Hope you have enjoyed my story and some pics of our trip.

Paul "COOT" Williams, owner of Coot's Lures