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The title “best walleye lake in America” is applied too freely these days. About a half a dozen lakes claim the designation, though clearly they can’t all be the best. So when a representative of North Dakota’s department of tourism told me Devils Lake in the north central part of his state fit the bill, I raised my eyebrows a bit and said “sure.”
It doesn’t take much to lure me to a good walleye lake, however, and before we ended our conversation last fall, I was ready to book an ice fishing trip to test the claim. I didn’t think I had anything to lose since Devils Lake has also recently been assigned the title, “best jumbo perch lake in America.”
When we arrived on March 4rth, we were greeted by 30-mile-per-hour winds and a real temperature of ten degrees below zero. The lake still had three feet of ice with two feet of snow on top of it - good stuff for ice fishermen.
After the standard disclaimers by the resort’s bait shop that fishing was great last week and not-so-good this week, we headed out with high hopes. Regular two lane roads had been plowed all over the lake, and in places, there were so many trucks, it was necessary to treat intersections like they had stop signs at them.
The crowds should have been our first clue that Devils lake was not going to be as good as advertised.
Nevertheless, we followed the frozen highway to an area recommended us by a fishing pro at the lodge. We chose a likely spot, and began blanketing the area with all sorts of presentations.
North Dakota allows four lines per fisherman, and since there were six of us, we took full advantage and placed 24 lines in the water. First we scattered 18 tip-ups from shallow to deep water. Some tip-ups were set with titanium leaders, dead herring and smelt for northern pike. Others were set with flourocarbon leaders and live fatheads for walleyes. We would have preferred using live decoy suckers on our tip-ups, but North Dakota doesn’t allow the use of big live bait. This rule is nonsense since it is legal to use live minnows, and puts pike fishermen at a great disadvantage.
Once all the tip-ups were set, we all hunkered into our portable shanties to jig for walleyes and get ready for “the best walleye fishing in America.” Six hours later, we hadn’t caught a single fish, had a single flag, gotten a single bump or seen a single fish on either the flasher or the underwater camera. The next six days were agonizing and ended with only ten small pike between all of us. Half of those came from another lake 20 miles from Devils Lake.
We fished for perch one day amongst a sea of other shanties. The results were the same for us and every other fisherman we spoke to. On the final day, we went into the timber on the advice of a local fishing guide. Soon after digging our holes, another group of anglers from Wisconsin dug in about 100 yards away from us.
As the evening progressed, we noticed and heard some activity among the other six anglers. Since we still weren’t catching anything, we walked over to talk to them. They had two walleyes on the ice, with the largest of the two being only 10-inches-long. The minimum in Devils Lake is 14 inches.
The anglers were excited and said that this was their second year at Devils lake. They told us they came back because they “really hammered the walleyes last year.” When we asked if last year’s fish were decent size, they immediately said “yeah, about the size of these.”
I am sure there are big walleyes and big perch in Devils Lake, but in all my years of fishing all of the other “best walleye lakes in America,” I have never seen worse fishing than I did in North Dakota. To not catch a single walleye or perch in a week of hard fishing says more about the lake than the fishermen.
Only biologists can say for sure, but I suspect Devils Lake has been hit too hard for too long, and that the density of fish in the 130,000 acre lake is too low to offer a great fishing experience. By comparison, I have fished week long high pressure ridges, thick ice and in deep snow on Lake Erie, Saginaw Bay and Mille Lacs and always turned up a fish or two. The fact that we never even marked a fish on the electronics or saw a fish on the camera tells me there simply were not a lot of fish around.
Fishermen who were exclusively targeting perch all week faired better than we did. They didn’t do great, however. We never met anyone who caught more than a half-dozen perch in an entire day of fishing.
The fact that we finally caught fish after moving to another lake 20 miles away, also told us that the poor bite at Devils Lake had less to do with the conditions than the lake itself.
So, not only doesn’t Devils Lake make my list of “ the best walleyes lakes in America“, it makes my growing list of “the most over-fished and overrated lakes in America.” Too bad. It remains a scenic lake with great potential. I hope someone fixes it soon.