2011 Walleye League Week 5
After watching the finish of a couple of big weekends of fishing up here in the North country, we were ready to head out on Tuesday for some walleye action. With the weather threatening again, we rolled up to Taber’s Bait and learned that the lake for the night would be Big Turtle. I can’t say that I dislike the lake… it’s a beautiful lake with a great variety of fish species… but we have definitely struggled in the walleye department, whether on league night or any other night. Two blanks and a couple of mediocre finishes in the last four years. Let’s just say we knew we had a challenge.
We listened to some helpful tips from a couple of guys at the bait shop and added to that the knowledge that we fished the lake once a couple of weeks ago with only a couple of walleyes to show for our effort. The lake has a couple of islands that form some great natural structure, and we opted to try one of them first knowing that others had found some success there earlier in the year. We left the landing and headed out into a pretty decent southeast wind. Our plan, as has been our pattern for most of the year, was to locate cabbage and work in and around it with jigs and shiners. My first concern was that I was not marking fish as I buzzed the boat around the general area, but we were hoping that they were sitting in the weeds. One other boat was about to start working a bit deeper, and as we settled on top of the weeds and started pitching jigs we watched as they boated a nice walleye out in about 13 feet of water doing the same thing. Encouraged, we kept up our pattern working deep to shallow trying to make contact, but the wind was making it a bit tricky and the northerns were being annoying as usual. The wind eventually made a shift from southeast to southwest, but the change didn’t do much to improve our fortunes. By about 7:00 we had nothing in the live well and we were talking about our options.
We decided to make a move back to a little hump at the north end that we fished a week or so ago. But I made the suggestion that we first make one pass along the island with shallow running crankbaits to see if the wind had encouraged a few walleyes to move super shallow along the emerging rushes that guarded the west shoreline of the island. We started our first pass heading north with the wind at our backs, and as soon as the boat moved out of the cabbage along a little point of reeds Junior got a solid whack and reeled in our first walleye. Now we have been making a concerted effort over the past couple of years to improve our live bait skills. Last year we focused on rigging, this year we have focused on jigging. So when our first walleye fell to our old reliable tactic we both had a little smirk. I was running a walleye colored SSR5 and Junior had a shad colored SSR5. In the next 20 minutes we made a few passes north and south along the island and boated 4 more walleyes including the 18 incher in the photo above. But the flurry of action stopped just about as fast as it had started. The wind had calmed quite a bit and it seemed as if the fish had abandoned the shallows. We were comfortable with the fact that we would be weighing 4 fish again, but we knew that we had plenty of room to upgrade our weight. So we opted to go back to jigging on our original spot for a while and then make another pass or two along the island after the sun dipped below the trees. We stumbled over a little hump in 13 feet of water and marked a couple of fish so we hovered over the spot and pulled out two more walleyes. Unfortunately neither of them was big enough to upgrade what we already had in the live well. So by 9:00 we stowed the jigging rods and pulled out the shad raps for another pass along the island. About half-way through the first pass I hooked into another nice fish that turned out to be another 18 incher almost identical to the one we pulled in earlier. Happy with the upgrade, we decided to just head back to the landing and get the boat out before the rest of the crowd started to roll in.
Junior had to spend a little time sorting the six fish in the live well to figure out which were our best fish, but he eventually tossed four into the bucket and brought it over to the scale and registered 5.74 pounds for the night. We sat and watched as the other teams rolled in and knew we were in pretty good position as most boats came in with a fish or two with a lot of 2 pound weights. When it was all said and done, one other team had a better night using leeches and put up over 6 pounds, but we managed second place and 14 points for the night. So we put week 5 in the books happy that we had good night when it counted on a lake that usually gets the better of us. With five weeks in the books, we are sitting in the top four, but need to keep up a pretty good pace to stay there with so many good teams in striking distance. Stay tuned as we hit the summer stretch with some great lakes still in the hat!
Sound like to really had to work to get the fish in. Nice job.
Nothing beats the thump feeling on a jig – but shad raps can be so darn effective (and relaxing)! Good work!
Definitely a nice way to cover water and put a few active fish in the live well!
[...] since I checked the board in the store, and I was pleasantly surprised that after our results from last week we were in a three-way tie for first. I’ve been in the league long enough to know how [...]