June 5, 2009 -- At Leech Lake

It's as if Northern Minnesota has decided to go from spring directly to autumn without a summer. The high temperature today was 46 degrees with a low of 34. The winds were very strong most of the day ranging from 15-20 mph from the NW. The wind, coupled with the low temperatures, made the wind-chill somewhere in the mid-30s all day long.

Last November, during the opening weekend of deer hunting season, the man who used to live in our house stopped by to say hi. Whenever Clancy is in the area, visiting one of his old neighbors, he likes to stop by and check out his old house. During this particular visit, Clancy was kind enough to give me a couple of very nice elk surlion steaks from a elk he took while hunting in Washington state. Anyway, those steaks had sat in my freezer until tonight.

I decided to BBQ the elk steaks on the grill and share them with Rick, since he had never had elk. We both enjoyed the elk meat very much.

By the time we finished dinner and had cleaned up, the wind had begun to die down. By 9:00 p.m. the wind was only at 8 mph out of the NW -- time to go trolling.

Rick and I got into the boat and immediately got our Minnow Raps in the water. We trolled in 8-12 feet of water from Malay's to the north to between Duck and Second Duck Points in the south. Rick caught five small walleyes around 13" and one 17 1/2" walleye which he released. I caught 14", 13" and 19" walleyes. The moon tonight was 96 percent waxing, just about a day from being full.

Although it was too windy to fish most of the day, we did get in some good walleye fishing on Leech Lake this evening.