Posts: 1126
Location: Minnesota. | Kirby Budrow - 7/17/2021 10:52 AM
Also, nothing against the original post here. He legit thought outside the box and caught more fish than most. How many times have you seen the report, “fished for 7 days straight and saw 3 fish and caught zero”. He did well.
Well written Kirby!
You gave the OP kudos (which I VERY much agreed with) and don't need to re-re-re justify your opinion of what goes on with Vermilion's rep. I only see the lake once a season - usually for 3-4 wks but man has it changed from 20-25 yrs. ago!!
Thank you for your input. I value the perspective!
Just spent 3 wks up there, got back a couple days ago and did nowhere near as well as the O.P. (wow!!) but I'm also fairly lazy and did more walleye fishing! |
Posts: 347
Location: Vilas County, WI | I was up there last week for a family trip. It was multi species but I/we did try some musky fishing through the week. I caught one 45" fish early in the trip; then lost a 40" fish at the boat later in the week. A few follows mixed in. I was very happy with these results considering I wasn't there to exclusively musky fish. Multi species went well as we got into everything but smallies.
We saw a couple muskies caught and this goes along with the posts about mortality and the frequent handling of the fish on Vermilion. Don't shoot the messenger... but one of the fish we saw caught was a better fish, and when the guys bumped it we could hear the "hell yeah's, holy *^&%, nice fish and F Bombs". Then they took the picture, but dropped the fish. Wham! On the bottom of the boat, flopping around etc. Things happen when handling these fish and we all do our part to handle them with care, have the appropriate release tool, etc. But on the flip side, things like this happen too. The fish did swim away, we hung in the area for awhile. Hopefully no delayed issues there. These appeared to be experienced musky anglers in a nice rig.
As for pressure, my theory is this. A resort has 10 cabins - every summer those 10 cabins are booked. So there's no additional fishing pressure coming from the resorts. Full capacity this summer is the same full capacity 8 years ago. Sure, more guys may be staying at the casino or motels down the road and trailering each day. I don't know. In my opinion, I thought the pressure on Vermilion was "normal" by my standards but again I don't live there and fish it all summer long. Also, at our resort 3 boats were bass guys, 2 boats walleye guys, 2 or 3 fair weather multi species anglers. No one in camp was exclusively there to musky fish.
It was extremely dry there and the water levels were way down, maybe 15-18". We did not have any issues with hazards due to the low water but many other boats did. We used Lakemaster chips and common sense - no problem for us. Also, lots of wildfire haze/smoke lingering. Some days I could even smell it. My wife had some allergy issues all week but we assumed it was from the smoke. Really bad storms blew through last Friday night and I see they've had a few more since our departure.
Edited by TheShow 7/29/2021 10:38 AM
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