Jeremy Johnson

Review of Ballard's Resort

On June 16, 2020 I treated my dad, father-in-law, ...

On June 16, 2020 I treated my dad, father-in-law, nephew, and two friends to a chartered walleye fishing excursion with Ballards on Lake of the Woods. We did not stay at their resort, we only booked the fishing excursion. We met Captain Andy on the dock at 8:00 am and boarded the boat. We left the dock, along with all of the other Ballards boats and left the Rainy River in a caravan on the lake. When we got close to where Captain Andy had planned on fishing, we broke out of line and found a spot with the rest of the fleet also anchoring In the same vicinity. Captain Andy handed each of us a rod and started putting bait on the jigs and gave us instructions on how we were going to fish. It was just a few minutes later and we started catching walleyes. I had purchased some mechanical counters so we could keep track of how many fish we each caught. By noon, we were just over 100 fish that were pulled in, but we still had room to keep 4 more as we had many fish that were in the slot that had to be thrown back. We all pulled in at least one fish that was over 26 inches and even pulled one in that was 28.5 inches long but decided to put that one back as well. Around 2:00 the wind had started to pick up and was blowing over 10 mph. We were expecting it to get up to 30 mph later on in the day. Around 4:00 the wind had been blowing hard enough to pop the anchor loose and we decided to go back to the resort; we would have been leaving in another 10 minutes anyways so it was an easy decision. We added up our total catches for the day and had 158 walleyes and saugers, and one 31 inch Northern for a total of 159 fish that we pulled in over the course of 8 hours. That s an average of 20 fish per hour for the six of us! We got back to the resort and waited in the bar until Captain Andy got all of the fish cleaned and bagged up for us. He also brought all of the saugers to the cook in the restaurant like we asked so we could start eating our catch before heading home.
Our only regret on this trip was that we didn t hang our fish on the board and get a picture with our haul. I thought of that about 20 minutes after we got back to the resort and half of our fish were already filleted. While having our picture taken with the fish we kept would have been a nice memory, it would not have been an accurate depiction of what we we actually catching since we were getting many fish that were too large to keep.
We are in the process of planning our trip for next year. Instead of just booking the chartered fishing excursion for a day, we are planning on spending a few nights in a cabin and a few days on the lake. We had a great time. Thank you Captain Andy.