The Visitor's Guide to Fishing Central North Dakota

By Daniel Sobieck

The only North Dakota fishing book written for visiting anglers! Here are all the tricks and tips you need to catch prairie gamefish in central North Dakota's small lakes from one of the area's most experienced anglers. Learn the top three tactics to take walleye, northern pike, perch, and bass spring, summer, and fall. Here you'll learn about the top lures, techniques, and bait to put fish on your stringer. Save money by making your own walleye rigs and catching your own bait -- this fully illustrated guide shows you how. Which lakes should you fish and which should you skip? This guide will show you step by step how to identify the best lakes before leaving home to lock in success on the water. Both a fun read and indispensable guide for visiting anglers. It also makes a great gift for your favorite angler.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dan Sobieck
• Release date: Apr 24, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393913146

Book preview

Preface

ABOUT THIS FISHING GUIDE FOR SMALL WATERS

Who is this Guide for? We’ve done well fishing, and we’ve been meaning to put together a fishing guide for some time, specifically a visitor’s fishing guide because we were just visitors once ourselves.

Although North Dakota is a sparsely-populated state, with less than 800,000 residents, we have quite a few anglers: 150,000 residents and 60,000 non-residents. By comparison, however, our neighbors to the east, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, both sell about 1.4 million fishing licenses per year. Michigan is close behind with a million licenses sold. So, we really don’t have a lot of anglers compared to other states. And by that same comparison, we really don’t have many fishing lakes. But the ones we have are pretty darn productive. You’ll learn all about the How’s and Whys of that shortly.

It seems our North Dakota lakes, or maybe it’s the landscape, or the weather here, can be intimidating. I’ll admit we rarely fish the sprawling waters of Devils Lake, and just recently started fishing the Missouri River. We’ll leave those larger waters to the guys with the $75,000 boats and 150 horsepower outboards who feel obligated to go 50 mph across the water to find fish. That’s one approach.

But smaller lakes are more our style—easy on, easy off, relatively easy to figure out. Not a lot of noise or unnecessary distraction. It helps that, due to our state’s robust fish stocking program, these lakes are also bursting with fish.

Like a million other anglers, we grew up in Minnesota fishing. As such, one is obligated to fish for walleyes. Dear old Dad liked small lakes too; the only problem was they didn’t have any fish. Yet we’d spend hour upon hour backtrolling over fishless flats and drops, snagging the occasional northern pike or big deep-water bluegill. This went on year after year until walleye fishing eventually took on a negative connotation. Backtrolling for the elusive walleye on those lakes shared a lot of the same attributes as an afternoon nap—you were rarely disturbed by fish.

As soon as I got my first boat I became a bass specialist, largemouth in lakes and smallmouth in the St. Croix River. It was an easy choice because we actually CAUGHT FISH, something I found very enjoyable. Don’t get me wrong, we loved the occasional meal of walleye whenever it was offered or available, but fishing for them just brought back painful memories.

It might not have helped that we only used nightcrawlers for bait in those years, because that was the only bait we could procure by ourselves at no cost. As a result, we probably missed those early season bites when the fish wanted minnows, and the late season bite when the fish wanted big leeches. We had crawlers.

We catch our own bait now for the most part, not because we’re cheap, but because the nearest bait shop is over 60 miles away. It always feels good to have a few dozen minnows or mudpuppies (salamander nymphs) in the barrel or a few dozen crawlers in the fridge ready to go fishing. We’ll show you how to catch your own in Chapter 10.

Looking back, I can see we wasted a lot of time on unproductive lakes, which is fine if you are out for some fresh air and sunshine but if you wanted fish, our time was really wasted; we should have been on better water. I never liked the idea that if you had the biggest boat and best gear you were somehow entitled to all the fish either. As you get older and wiser you realize less really is more.

I’d much rather be floating around in a 14-foot rowboat with the grandson catching some bluegills on a cane-pole than zipping around in a big boat cutting waves around the rowboat guys. In many ways, this guide is a push back against that trend.

So, if you’ve had a tough go of it, and you don’t have the biggest or best boat or gear, maybe this guide is for you. And maybe you will find, as I have, that North Dakota is a special place for fishing. (These same qualities apply to North Dakota hunting, but that’s another story.)

And for those who would prefer we keep all this a secret and keep our fishery closed to outsiders, I say moose snot! Selfishness is a short-sighted and unattractive trait. It’s a plain fact that if every youngster in America