The Metro

I love the fishing around the suburban Lake Minnetonka area.  There is an enormous amount of fishing opportunities in my immediate vicinity.  Ten minutes to my south, Lake Minnetonka is an excellent largemouth and muskie lake.  Fifteen minutes west is the Crow River, a river that holds large amounts of channel catfish and smallmouth bass.  Christmas Lake, near Lake Minnetonka, is managed as a two-story lake and has rainbow trout.  The Mississippi even has paddlefish and gar, and there are sturgeon in the St. Croix.  Bass, northern pike, and crappie are found in almost every lake in the area.  Walleyes and muskie are stocked in many of the surrounding lakes.  You can spear pike in many lakes and bowhunt carp.

With that said, the downfall of metro fishing will continue to be the eternal search for trophy fish.  With musky it is not a problem, as almost all musky fishing practiced nowadays is catch and release.  But trophy-size bass, walleye, and pike are continually hard to find.  In such proximity to the Twin Cities, a forty-inch northern is unheard of and the walleye rarely top thirty inches.

For example, a thirty inch pike around here can take around eight years to reach that size.  That's eight years of avoiding hungry predators and fishermen, and to be honest, not that many make it that large.  The premier pike lakes around my area are Medicine and Sarah, and even in those, it can be hard to find a pike over thirty inches long.

I realize that Lake of the Woods, Mille Lacs, and Vermilion are wonderful fisheries and some of the best in the country.  Canada is hard to compare with.  But I don't have the advantage of having a cabin like so many Minnesotans, up north where larger fish are a little easier to find.

Even given all that, though, I probably still wouldn't change locations based on fishing preferences.  Despite the added challenge, it's hard to beat Medina for pure variety in fishing opportunities.