I’m just going to go ahead and declare August “Walleye Month”. Put it on your calendar and see if you can get a day off. We started the month in Escanaba, Michigan fishing the Cabela’s NTC tournament. The night we got back we hit Lake Irving to do a little pre-fishing before our last night of league… you’ve already read the story of the following night here. On Saturday we headed north to Ontario, Canada for a week-long fishing trip on Lac Seul. I’ll be writing about that in great detail after fish-offs, but suffice it to say that the fishing and company were outstanding.

This all leads us up to Tuesday night, the first night of fish-offs. The top four teams from Tuesday night league and the top four teams from Thursday night league join together to determine the 2011 champion. The theme is pretty basic; two nights of fishing, teams weigh-in each night, the team with the top combined weight from the two nights is the champion. We had no idea going in which lake we would be fishing… all lakes but Bemidji are supposed to be in the hat.

Trev and I rolled up early anxious to see what lake would be pulled. We quickly learned that Wolf Lake was the lake of honor for the evening. I would be lying if I said that I wasn’t a bit let down. Of all of the options in the hat, Wolf is probably one of the toughest late season lakes for us. If you recall, we struggled on this lake during week 9, so we weren’t exactly brimming with confidence as we started to formulate our strategy. We know the places we’ve found fish before, we know the places that others found fish before, and we know a couple of spots that are likely to hold a few walleyes. We all headed to the landing, launched our rigs and took off as a group when launchmaster Ron blasted his horn.

At the north end of the lake there is a nice little rock pile… classic walleye structure. We started there with crawlers and leeches working deep to shallow, marking a few fish along the way and missing a bite or two before moving to option 2. The next location is a little underwater point on the west side of the lake that extends out from a long north-south reed point. We’ve found fish there before and we marked fish on the south side, but a few passes through the hot zone produced nothing. We then focused on the east side of the long mid-lake point. This is great structure… a bed of emergent reeds that drops sharply to about 20 feet. Again, we marked a few fish and finally picked up a very small walleye in about 18 feet, but a few more passes produced nothing more. We knew that another team on another night had some luck along this point with crankbaits, so we pulled out the trolling gear and ran tight to the weed line with deep running #5s with absolutely no results. Our plan was to work the big sunken island adjacent to this point as well, but from what we could see, the two boats working it all night hadn’t pulled out a single fish either. We made a couple of runs north and south on the east end with the crankbaits and picked up nothing. Scratching our heads, we moved back to the long point and trolled a bit further south. We had a little excitement when Trev pulled in a nice 14 inch crappie, but the walleye action was non-existent.

We knew at this point that we had to cover water and stick with the cranks. It was search and destroy as the sun dipped below the trees. We had exhausted or eliminated most of our decent live bait options and we figured our best chance at salvaging a fish or two was to cover water. We hopped over to the southeast side of the lake and pulled SR5s in about 10 feet along the weedlines. From there we ran to the southwest corner and put on the SSR5s for some shallow runs along a little trickier stretch of lake. Another team was there and we saw them net at least one fish along the stretch we planned to try. We headed the opposite direction as they moved north and then turned and continued our run along the same patch of lake. Unfortunately, we couldn’t muster a single fish. We made a couple of passes with our last run north toward the landing, and at 9:25 we knew we were toast.

I said it long ago when I started this blog… this is not a site full of stories about how to catch baskets full of walleyes. This is the way it works most of the time. We love to tell the stories about the times we hammer the fish, but more often than not, the results are less than stellar. We loaded up the boat and started to assess the damage. As I jumped on the dock, one of the guys was hauling two fish back to the water. One looked to be about 14 inches, and the other looked to be about 25 inches… an absolute pig. All told, four teams caught fish. The top team weighed two fish for just over 5 pounds, second place weighed two fish for just over 4 pounds, third had three fish at just over 2 pounds, and the fourth place team weighed one nice 20 incher at just over 2 pounds. 8 teams, 16 anglers, 3.5 hours of fishing and 8 fish were weighed. That’s what we call a slow bite.

So I tip my hat to the top four teams on the leaderboard. They left the rest of us with a bit of a hill to climb on Thursday night, but with the right lake and a little bit of luck pretty much anything can happen. Stay tuned this weekend for the final results… it looks to be an interesting finish!

A busy week has slowed long enough for me to catch up on my writing. We just returned from our trip to Escanaba, Michigan and a great time on Little Bay de Noc. I will have more about that in a future post. But walleye fishing league has reached the final weeks and another barn-burner of a finish is on tap. If you recall, I left you at the end of week 10 where we finished with 10 points, clinging to a precarious second place position with several teams within striking distance. Knowing that we only had two weeks of fishing left before we took our bye to head up to Canada, we had to score some points to put space between us and the five or six teams still battling for a spot in the top four. A bad showing on either of the next two nights would leave us in a tough position going into the last week where we will sit idle while the other teams have a free shot at catching us.
See the rest of 2011 Walleye League Weeks 11 and 12 →

The definition of insanity, according to Albert Einstein, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. We spent two nights fishing Lake Beltrami last week. I was actually by myself one night and spent a little time searching for fish and testing a couple of different presentations with no success before I headed to a cabbage-covered flat and started pitching jigs tipped with fatheads. I found a few rock bass and northerns, but no walleyes. A couple of nights later I headed out with Trev and we pounded away at that flat again, sure that there had to be walleyes lurking in there. Again, we found a wide variety of species, but not a single walleye.

So on Tuesday night when we learned that we would be fishing Beltrami, one might have thought that logic would dictate that we would switch gears and try something different, right? Au contraire, my good reader. We purchased a bucket full of fatheads and headed right back to the same area… confident that walleyes would suddenly appear out of thin… water. And the evening started predictably enough, with a variety of rock bass, largemouth, crappies and perch. We even lost a couple of jigs to hungry northerns. Then something strange happened out there in 12 feet of cabbage-riddled water. Trevor caught a walleye. The first in two weeks, I might add. Elated to be on the board, we continued furiously pounding the water. The oddball species continued to attack our presentation and then Trev latched into a fish that managed to get itself wrapped up in the cabbage. He maintained tension on the line while I kicked the trolling motor forward and maneuvered the boat toward the spot where the line was hooked. He could see that it was a walleye and I quickly grabbed the net and scooped it up. Two walleyes in about 10 minutes. Things were looking up.

I could bore you with the details of the remainder of the evening. We continued what we were doing for the next hour or so with no further success. It appeared that we had milked all of the walleyes we were going to get out of that cabbage for the night. We pulled crankbaits for a while in some other areas of the lake but eventually came back to that flat for the last half-hour without another bite.

We got to the landing and discovered that a few other boats had some great success. The most interesting thing about this was the variety of methods used to catch fish. The winners weighed over 7 pounds of fish that night all caught on a leech and slip bobber over a mid-lake hump. Another team caught eight walleyes pulling crankbaits all night over the weeds. The rest of the top teams were using crawlers or leeches on lindy rigs. In the end, our two fish were good enough for 10 points, a number that we could live with.

We now find ourselves in a very tight contest. A mere 6 points separate us, now in second place overall, from the team in fifth place. We have two nights to put up good numbers to get some kind of separation before we take our bye when we head to Canada on the 16th. At that point, our shot at a top-four finish is completely out of our hands. We’ll be spending a few hours on Cass Lake and Lake Irving trying to find a few walleyes in the next couple of weeks.

We head to Michigan on Wednesday to fish the Cabela’s NTC tournament on the Bays de Noc. I’ll do my best to post some updates hopefully with a few pictures from the big lake. We’re looking forward to a fun time.

Our brief streak of good fortune came to a screeching halt this past week with a less-than-stellar performance during week 9 of walleye fishing league. This week was “mystery week” which basically meant every team put a lake name in the hat and the lake drawn would be the lake we fished. And the lucky lake for the week was Wolf. We did OK there earlier in the season, but our late summer experiences on this lake are poor to say the least.

We brought everything; crawlers, leeches, shiners and… of course, cranks. We hit every spot we fished before during week 4 and marked a few scattered fish, but we only scared up one small 8 inch walleye for our efforts. He was in the weeds on top of a little hump and hit a crawler on a lindy rig, but after working that spot for another hour with nothing to show for it we started to scramble. Wolf has a big mid lake hump and a couple of boats were working the edges. We made one pass with a mix of crawlers and leeches and then made a few more passes with shad raps over the top finding one northern along the way.

Our final hour was spent pulling cranks along the last few stretches that had produced walleyes for us in the past, and once again we were rewarded with a nice 10 inch walleye… exciting, but useless for the weigh-in. By 9:25 there was a … shall we say… “cranky” mood in the boat. Blanks are never fun, and as we get toward the end of the season and things get tighter at the top they are really tough. Fish were caught Tuesday, one boat hauled in a nice 25 incher for big fish, but like the last few evenings, the rest of the field scratched an clawed for one or two. There were about five blanks, and our only good fortune of the night was that two of the other blanks were teams in the top four with us! So we somehow managed to hang on to third place overall by a few points and need to weigh fish the next three nights to hang on to that spot.

It will be a busy week this week as we prepare for the NTC tournament on the Bays de Noc. One week after that we head north for a week on Lac Seul with some friends, so we will sit out the last night of league (Lake Bemidji) hoping that we have enough of a lead by then to hold on to a top four spot. Stay tuned, things are getting exciting!

Rarely do we have such long stretches without fishing during the summer. We had a great Fourth of July break in Kansas. My grandmother passed during the week and so I spent a day in Minneapolis with family that I haven’t seen for years. Then Junior and I tried to get out on Friday only to discover that the lug nuts on the passenger side wheel of the boat trailer had mysteriously become loose. How we made it all the way home from league night on lake Julia the previous week without serious incident is beyond me, but we had to scrap the evening of walleye fishing so I could get a replacement hub the following day. We tried to get out on Sunday, but lightning chased us off the lake after a grand total of five minutes of fishing. So Monday was it before league night and we managed to get in an evening with a couple of walleyes boated. I was definitely chomping at the bit to get back to league fishing.
See the rest of 2011 Walleye League Week 8 →

Tuesday afternoon was calm and sunny. Easily the nicest night of the year. While calm and sunny skies don’t usually bode well for walleye fishing, nobody was complaining at Taber’s after the bath we got last week. To top things off, we pulled Lake Julia for the night. One of my favorite lakes for pulling out a big walleye like the one in this post from last year.
See the rest of Walleye League Week 7 →