Trip Report: A Mid-Week Bass Run Out of Grays Bay on Lake Minnetonka

Living on Lake Minnetonka means a trip like this barely counts as an outing — it's more like a short walk with a boat attached. I put in at the Grays Bay launch on a Tuesday evening, and the ramp was wide open, which never happens here on a weekend. Mid-week is the move if you actually want a parking spot.

I mostly went out to pressure-test some sonar mapping configurations I've been tinkering with rather than to fish seriously, but that plan didn't survive contact with Wayzata Bay. I ended up pitching jigs under the docks and picked up a few genuinely nice largemouth bass holding tight to the shade lines. Nothing fancy — just skip a jig as far back under the dock as you can manage and let it sink on a slack line. The bass here relate hard to dock structure and shade, especially once the sun's up, and Wayzata Bay has more dock frontage per mile of shoreline than almost anywhere else on the lake.

Hard to beat having water like this right in the backyard, even though the weekend boat traffic on Minnetonka gets genuinely ridiculous by mid-morning most summer Saturdays. That's the trade-off of a lake this central to the metro — see our family fishing lakes near the Twin Cities roundup if you want other metro options that see less wake traffic.

One non-fishing takeaway: I need to rethink the boat's tackle storage layout. Way too much wasted space right now, and I spent more time this trip digging for the right jig head than actually fishing.

Notes for anyone fishing Grays Bay / Wayzata Bay:

• Go mid-week if your schedule allows it. Minnetonka's boat traffic on summer weekends will run you off the water; it's manageable pretty much any other day.
• Docks are the pattern in Wayzata Bay for largemouth bass — skip jigs as far back into the shade as you can get them.
• Check current conditions before you head out; wind direction matters more on Minnetonka than on a smaller lake because of how much open water there is to build a chop across.

Not every trip needs to be a destination drive. Some of the best fishing I do all year is twenty minutes from my own driveway.