Viking Island Trip Report

We returned from a fantastic week of fishing at Viking Island on Douglas Lake.  We were there from June 6-13 and really hit the Walleye bite almost perfect.  Here is a standard fish from Douglas.

The basics – Viking Island on Douglas Lake has been around for a LONG time. The island is a quick 20 minute flight from Red Lake.  The Carlson family built and operated the island from the 1940s to 2014. Last off season they sold the island to Vito Tarantino.  We were a bit nervous what this would mean to our trip but we quickly learned Vito is a good guy from Red Lake who spent the winter making a number of improvements to the docks / lodge / infrastructure.

My dad, son and I flew in a day early and viking air and viking island were both very accommodating.  We got in early and avoided sitting around red lake waiting for our float flight in.  Once we arrived at the island we spent a couple of hours arranging our gear and putting groceries away.  Once we hit the water around 5p we quickly figured out the walleye bite was on.  I have been coming to Douglas for more than 30 years and the number and general size of fish was really amazing.  I have had many 100 fish days but this trip was amazing.  We easily boat 2000+ walleye with 5 guys in 6 days of fishing. The average size is around 20-21 inches.  We had MANY heavy running 23 inch 4+ lb ones too.

This lake is now and has pretty much always been a numbers lake and it is very healthy right now.  To give some perspective we started trying to find ways that wouldn’t catch walleyes and really couldn’t stay away from them.  We caught most of the fish shallow in 7-12 feet with 1/8 oz jigs tipped with minnows, but we decided to troll deeper for Trout.  We caught walleyes at 30+ feet over 80 feet. (I would’ve bet a lot of money these were Lake Trout…) Then casting spinning baits we caught walleyes. We tried ultra shallow mudflats and caught walleyes.  You get the idea.  

We enjoyed the portage to Hatchet Lake a few times and caught some larger pike including a really gorgeous 36+ pike. In general the average size pike on Hatchet was close to 30 inches.

The hospitality.  The fishing.  The improvements to the facilities all made for a great trip.

Brett