St. Germain...Trip #4

Ok, until I learn how to do HTML coding or something like that, this is the best I am going to be able to organize the pictures.

To start, this was our 4th trip to St. Germain in the last three years.  I guess it would by my 5th trip if you include a short day trip with Carly over Memorial Day weekend last year.  That said, the trip to St. Germain is one of the highlights of my fishing year...probably actually my year in general.

We started going to St. Germain after watching John Gillespie fish there so regularly on his show.  It is only 4.5 hours from my house, so I figured why not give it a chance.  My dad, brothers and I started fishing there with literally no knowledge of the area, but we now feel pretty good about catching fish on no fewer than six lakes.  We have found lakes we like to fish in the morning, some we like in the afternoon, and some we prefer in the evening.  This means we are able to fish from sun up to sun down for the entire trip.

While we have successfully found some fish on our own, I credit Rob Manthei with teaching us how to fish up here.  He has not only taught us through the guided trips we have booked with him, but he is incredibly generous with information to the people who choose to stay at his resort (LINKED HERE).  Rob is pretty much responsible for saving our trips with tips and suggestions.  There are so many lakes in the St. Germain area that without someone's help, it would be nearly impossible to figure out where and when to fish the various bodies of water.  This is why I strongly suggest staying at St. Germain Lodge and Resort and booking a couple trips with Rob Manthei.

We caught fish from as shallow as 4 ft of water to as deep as 25 ft of water.  We caught them on rocks and in weeds.  We caught them casting and we caught them drifting.  While most of our walleyes came on a jig and crawler combination, I had a great time catching bass and pike by casting a jerk bait over weeds in 7-9 ft of water.

After a four day trip, we ended up catching almost 50 walleyes, 30 of which would have been keeper size and 8 of them being too big to keep.

We caught countless bass both smallmouth and largemouth.

We caught a dozen or so northern pike, the biggest of which was 32".

And we caught dozens of keeper sized bluegills and perch.

While I do not judge the success of a fishing trip by the amount of meat that ends up in my freezer, it sure was exciting to catch so many quality fish.