If you follow me on my Snapchat you know there are two things I absolutely hate. One is the beet juice they use on our streets in Bismarck in the winter, the other is wind. As you can guess by the time of year, I haven’t been complaining about the beet juice yet. The wind on the other hand, that’s another story.

It’s been a battle trying to guide with the heavy winds we have had the last month or so. Thank goodness for the Rage boat I use from Open Water Marine in Mandan. The boat is an absolute beast and actually makes some of these rough days more tolerable. So again, thank you Shawn Volk and Open Water Marine! If you are in the market for an awesome big water boat, he has 3 different brands. Rage, Tuffy, and Angler Quest Tritoons all of which are great rough water boats.

Now for this weeks fishing report. Even with the heavy winds, both Devils Lake and Lake Sakakawea have been good to decent. Early this week fishing was pretty good on Devils. I had to hide from the wind, but we still managed limits. Jigs and crawlers, jigs and minnows anchored on structure or moving water was best on DL.

Sakakawea was the tale of two different stories. One day we targeted big fish! We stayed in the 20′ to 28′ zone with jig raps and creek chubs. We didn’t catch many, but the ones we did catch were giants. 23″ to 27″ fish were boated and two absolute tanks were lost on jig raps near the surface. Definitely a grinder bite, but tournament quality fish. The next day for some reason those fish wouldn’t corporate, so we slid out to 50 plus and honestly as deep as 70′ and caught our fish. Again, jig raps were the ticket. The tough part with jig raps is they are not a client friendly way to fish.

Lots of big fish are showing up on Sakakawea. Water temps are still pretty high for this time of year. We saw on average anywhere from 62 to 66 degrees. Would like to see it drop into the 50’s. Seems like the magic fall number up here is around 55. I think once it gets to there things will really begin to fire and we will have an unbelievable fall bite up here!

I’m still hoping we will get a good fall bite south of Bismarck on the river. I will begin to probe the river probably a few times next week and I will keep everyone informed as to how the bite is going on the river near Bismarck.