Experiment with Snell Length when Walleye Fishing with Lindy Rigs

I got a little reminder about experimenting last week when my wife and I hit a local lake to test the walleye action. Earlier in the week my son and I had fished league using lindy rigs and leeches. Our setup was comprised of a six foot leader with a plain red hook tipped with a nice big leech. The idea was to move very slowly using the electric trolling motor to let the leech swim around. We were lucky enough to boat one nice 22″ fish using this setup, but did not catch another walleye that night with this setup. You can read that blog posting for the rest of the story, but we switched to other baits, basically giving up on the rig for the night.

So my wife and I headed to another lake the next night and I figured we would try the same thing. There was a nice big sunken rock pile that had been producing fish for a few days so we started there, moving slowly from 20 feet back in to 8 or 9 feet marking fish the whole time, but not getting any bites. There were several other boats on the same structure doing just as poor. Then my wife mentioned that she really didn’t like the long snell. She was used to fishing with a much shorter snell when using lindy rigs. So just for the heck of it, I cut her snell in half. We moved to the south end of the lake and started working the edge of a nice flat and within minutes she had a walleye. I chalked it up to luck, but a couple more passes with no bites for me and several for her got me wondering. After she boated her second walleye I chopped my snell in half. I immediately started getting action. The fish were biting very light that night, so they needed to be fed a little line after the first tap. After a couple more passes I was able to add two more fish to the live well.

We had drawn the attention of a couple of other boats, and soon had to start dodging between them to follow our path, so we decided to call it a night. We had that spot in our pockets, so we were happy with a few nice walleyes for the freezer. The most important lesson of the night was the reminder that if what you are doing is not working, you should not be afraid to change what you are doing. Experimenting with something as simple as changing the length of your snell can make a world of difference. Because we were in such shallow water it was difficult to know where the fish were holding, but it would be logical to assume these fish were holding tight to the bottom and wanted something a bit closer before they would attack. A shorter snell and still slow presentation (.8 miles per hour generally) did the trick that night.