Depressions, Flooded Sloughs, and Man Made Ponds!
(34 Devils Lake Depression Locations To Target This Early Ice Season)
Early Ice Favorites!
Some of our favorite areas to target when we can first get onto the main body of Devils Lake is depressed areas. There are many of these areas on The Big Devil due to the fact that it has risen over 30 feet over the last 20-30 years. Sloughs, stock ponds, lagoons, and road ditches have all been swallowed up by the rising waters.
Several of these areas are actually in quite deep water and aren’t just Walleye and Pike habitat. In fact, our 3 favorite early ice Perch locations fall into the category of depressions.
We don’t necessarily target these depressions in the same way that we would say: a ‘large sunken flat’ or a ‘staggered shoreline ledge area’. Many of these depressions are not terribly large and can be thoroughly searched in a short period of time by a small group of people.
They also give us the opportunity to Walleye fish and Perch fish at the same time in the same location.
We will take you through what a few of these areas are going to look like and how we would attack them.
Man Made Structures/Lagoons
Surprisingly, there are a number of these structures on Devils Lake. They differ from the others in that they have that abrupt hump running right down the middle of it and that is where we are going to focus much of our attention when fishing them. The Walleye in the feature picture was caught on the middle hump of one of these structures. That middle hump provides a prime ambush area for big walleyes to lay in wait and ambush from below.
Closed Depression W/Lobes
Similar to the lagoons, this type of depression on Devils lake provides a couple of those ambush areas to focus the Walleye Golden Hour on before we move out onto the depression itself to Perch Search.
Flooded Stock Ponds
These have always intrigued me as often times they are just smack dab in the middle of a structureless plain out in the water (cow pasture anyone?). Giving artificial structure to an otherwhise flat basin is ideal structure to target as that structure is going to attract a lot of fish attention.
Flooded Slough Bottom/Open To Deep Water
These give us a double ambush area that are both usually pretty close together and then kind of a runway. We have caught so many fish on one of these out east that anytime we run across one of them on The Big Devil, we are going to investigate it thoroughly.
Flooded Slough Bottom/Closed
There is one notorious one on the Main Bay that is almost always our first stop out on first ice. They attract a lot of Walleyes, Perch, and Pike; also the location of our only non-6 Mile Bay crappie. Just a real fishy structure.
Good Luck Out There!
Where can someone access the north side of 6 mile bay?