We are officially residents of Minnesota now! Let's fish!

I posted back in August about moving up to Minnesota. Got some good help & advice and now it's finally over! Our house is FINALLY sold in GA and we are officially residents.

We're in Elk River, right on the Mississippi. Here's a shot of the back yard and dock. Excited to get fishing. I was excited to get some warm weather fishing in before winter but of course the day we get up here we get greeted with 45 degree weather!

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Welcome to Minnesota. Not a bad state once you get past the politics and taxes.

Nice water access. Give us some reports w/ pics.

Good to have you. Just in time for the fall bite, too, but you better get used to the 45 degrees. It won't be long and 45 degrees is going to feel real nice by comparison. :)

The 45 degrees was to get rid of the mosquitoes before you got here. Welcome!

Fished a few times so far from the shore. Caught 6 about this size so far - all on soft plastic

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Caught my first northern pike ever this past weekend. What a blast. Was tossing a small 4" plastic worm and he hit it 4 times before I finally set the hook into him. I was amazed at how many times he kept attacking it after I failed to set the hook

Nothing to brag about, maybe a 2lbs fish....but still really cool

Pike are fun. They get a lot larger, too, the big old females do. We have taken several over 30" (roughly 10 pounds + or -) right inside the city limits of Minneapolis just this year, one caught by a friend went 37" or 38". They can show up when casting or fishing just about any presentation, too. My biggest ones (over 30") this year took crappie sized offerings, and my friend's big one took a bass plug. Spinners, spoons and cranks do the most damage, because they are used most and can generate some real hard strikes, but dead and cut bait, even live nightcrawlers will take a pike quite frequently.

BTW speaking of nightcrawlers, what we have up here are the real thing, the actual big, fat Canadian crawlers, and they are naturalized all over around here. Prior to white colonization here on up north had no native worms. What we have around here now are all naturalized from European hitchhikers on plant and nursery stock roots. There are places up north where they haven't even gotten to yet. You probably have them in your lawn, in fact; most of us do. What they tend to call nightcrawlers down south are pretty puny in comparison.

No1son is usually pretty thorough in his posts, but he didn't mention to "Mind The Teeth!" ;)

lol

Yeah, pike have teeth, and so do walleyes, pretty impressive ones in both cases. Pike teeth like those of chain pickerel have slashing teeth with cutting edges (as do the muskies - it runs in that family), the walleyes have peg teeth with just sharp points. A couple of things pike don't have are spines in their fins and sharp edges on their gill plates, both of which walleyes have.

But both largemouth and catfish have drawn my blood in the past year or two with the pads of small teeth they do have, and I have slipped holding slimey carp and nearly impaled myself on the hook; so now I use a jaw-gripper and a long nosed plier to remove hooks on all my larger fish of whatever species. For deeper hooked panfish a surgical forceps is also invaluable.

It also pays to protect the line from cut offs when specifically targeting pike or muskies. All it takes is a touch of a tooth edge on a taut line and the hooked fish is gone. There is a very interesting discussion about metal leaders especially among those who target the bigger members of the pike family. Some of those guys spend more on leaders than I would on a good rod. I find that metal leaders decrease my panfish take; so I seldom use them. I get cut off quite frequently while panfishing, something like at least once every two to four outings, and I land maybe one in 6 or 8 of those takes. The big toothies take the tiny panfish baits directly much more commonly than those who target them generally admit. You maybe won't believe it, until you actually see it happen, which I have a number of times.

Yes, I noted the teeth lol. Down south I fished a lot of dark water (tea colored) that was rich with chain pickerel so I'm pretty familiar. These notherns are just chain pickerels on growth hormones :)

Question for you guys - I'm sitting here staring at the river right now. It's about 45-50 degrees outside, calm, and very overcast. With water temps being what they are right now, is it a waste to throw a buzzbait or top water bait right now? I've been having decent luck with soft plastics but the conditions just look nice for top water but then again, the water temps are so cold.......and then again, I'm dealing with fish that are more accustomed to cold water than the fish I'm used to down south.

So what say you...waste of time to throw a top water on November 5th in Minnesota?

Wait until you see your first muskie! There are a high percentage of muskies quite capable of eating just about the largest chain pickerel you tend to catch down south. And they would do it, too, since that entire Esox genus are preferential cannibals.

There are a few of them in the river that runs right past your door, in fact. You wont see em very often but they are there. Both pike and muskies are active all winter. I have had muskies come right into the ice hole and attack transducers on both of my flashers. I would say its not a waste of time to throw the top waters you might under similar conditions back in Georgia. There may or may not be better offerings for this time of year, but the big eaters may be anywhere once their lake mixes good and the river stays more uniform all year around. Both Esox species work shallow water pretty heavily in the fall after turn over for panfish and other bait fish that are exposed when the surface weeds sink. So do largemouths at least in the lakes. Same in the spring for all three species. They can be and often are taken through the ice all winter, although there are some famous patterns in some places. Before they moved the end of muskie season up to Dec 1, there was a pretty active early ice fishery for them, generally on tip ups baited with suckers.

Northern and southern tactics translate surprisingly well back and forth when the species is the same and conditions allow, although as water cools most of us down size a bit, although not everybody.

Excellent - great information!

I really wish we'd gotten down here earlier to fish the river during some warm weather.