How is the fishing between Sawbill and Burnt? Going in on June 22nd for three nights. Any advice would be great, have never been there.

Thank you in advance

I'm putting in at Sawbill on July 5 will be in that area until the 10th, so I'd be curious how people are doing as well. Also going to Wine lake for a few days. My first time in that part of the BWCA.

I liked Burnt Lake. Caught some nice walleyes there just trolling around for a bit. The campsite we stayed at had a good sized pile of fish remains in the water in a little bay, which was a little nasty. Cool lake.

We are going into Sawbill this Friday and coming out Monday the 22nd. Maybe we will see you on the way out to share a fishing report! This is my second year going to Sawbill.

Best of luck to all you folks and hope the weather is on your side. I've been to Sawbill a handful of times, but mainly after ice-out(this year it'll be in Aug/Sept)and have fished Sawbill, and Smoke lakes. Both produced fair numbers of walleye's, and of good size and several smallmouth. Not too many northern's though.
Hopefully there'll be good reports of numbers as well as size for all of you that go. Never been up to Wine but I hope report is good, Looking forward to the feedback.

Ill be out there end of July so curious as to how it goes. Thanks

We just got back from our trip 6/19-6/21. We set up base camp on Smoke, fishing was a little tough there. Caught a number of decent sized walleye on black and orange jig heads tipped with leeches in about 10’. Saturday it rained all day (1.25”) so we didn’t fish any. Sunday we portaged to Burnt and had great luck there. Our other group caught a few small Northerns, some nice sized walleye off orange rapalas. My partner and I switched to pearl zulus w/ red 1/0 worm hook and absolutely killed the smallmouth on top water. Nothing trophy size, but around the 1.5-2lbs. Great fights! They were tight to the bank lines in the tall grass and near fallen trees. We fished for about 4 hours and caught/released about 30 bass each. My partner has really never fished much and had a blast reeling in all the fish. I caught a bass that had three dragonflies in his throat so they were really feeding hard. Another nasty front was moving in that night so we cut our trip 1/2 day short. All in all a nice trip.

Thanks for the tips. How were the skeeters and flies?

Hardly anything out there for bugs. I put on some bug spray in the mornings and never got bothered all trip. I don't think I had to even swat a mosquito the whole trip. We went this time of year two years ago and had to wear bug head nets the whole time.

The girl at the outfitters said this was super rare to have no bugs this time of year. Hope it stays that way for you!

I was in the Sawbill area July 4-10. Initially we planned on going up to Wine, but after chatting with the outfitter, we decided to scrap our plan and do part of the Lady Loop instead (Phoebe/Grace/Beth), and last two nights on Alton.

Fishing was slow all week. Between the two of us, we caught 6 fish (3 SM, 2 northern, 1 tiny walleye). I was using leeches on jigs (floating and lead), as well as crawlers on a crawler harness. Tried a few cranks as well (shad rap, husky jerks, other raps). Everything was on leeches or crawlers. It was very windy on each lake all week, and it got exhausting paddling back across the lake and drift across. We aren't the best anglers, but we were both disappointed with the fishing.

Bugs weren't too bad. My friend used 100% deet all week and was fine. I usually used 20% picaridin and that seemed to work well. On the portages though, I used Ultrathon 34% deet. Only once did I put on a mosquito net for a 280 rod portage while carrying the canoe.

Otherwise, it was a great trip with only one night of rain (nasty T-storm on July 5), but beautiful the rest of the week. We are working on our daily journals for a trip report and hope to have that posted soon. I also need to sort through the 800+ photos I took on my DSLR camera and do some editing, which will probably take a few weeks! My friend took some videos, but it might take a few months to piece those together along with pictures.

Cheers,
Tom