Walleye Fishing League Episode 11 – An Exercise in Patience
Heading into the last few weeks of walleye fishing league, we once again found ourselves pre-fishing to locate a spot or two we could count on for a few fish come Tuesday night. Sitting only 5 points behind the coveted fourth place slot, we need to maintain our pace of top 5 finishes to have a shot at the fish-offs at the end of the month. Last week’s first place finish helped our cause immensely, so now instead of simply trying to break 100 for the season, we have a legitimate shot at fourth.
On Sunday evening we headed to Cass Lake in the pouring rain. We fish Cass only a couple of times each year and have yet to “discover” any spots that we could reasonably consider reliable places to put a walleye or two in the live well. When we got to the landing we could see the rain moving in. By the time we hit our first spot, we were getting pounded by a heavy rain. Undaunted, we carried out our plan of working shallow humps with shad raps to see if we could find any active fish. In our first hour or so the perch action was consistent, but the walleyes were nowhere to be found. The rain eventually stopped but the sky was still dark and threatened to smack us again. We headed over to a long bar that we targeted earlier and to our surprise we found a walleye fairly quickly. The edges of this bar come up from 25-30 feet to 8 feet on the edge fairly quickly. From the edge it slowly transitions to 5 or 6 feet on the top. We concentrated on a “zone” of about 30 yards from the edge of the drop where the depth was about 9 feet to the inside where depths hit about 6 feet. There are scattered weed patches in this area, so we were able to troll our shallow runners well behind the boat without hanging up in weeds too often. For an hour or so we picked up walleyes along this path, nothing big, but enough to make us feel that we could probably count on this area to put some 15 inchers in the live well on league night. By sunset we decided we had learned all we needed to learn that night, so we headed off with a little more confidence that we knew at least one spot on Cass.
So on Tuesday night we were pleasantly surprised that Cass was pulled out of the hat. On the way to the landing Junior and I agreed that we would be happy to put four fish in the boat. We felt that the size of the fish we caught on Sunday would not win for the night, but that it would be enough to put us in the top 5. Plenty of other teams out there knew Cass far better than us and they would be looking deeper early to find a big fish or two to weigh. We headed straight to our bar. The plan was to make a pass or two with the shad raps to see if we could find a fish, and if that didn’t produce anything we would work a lindy rig and crawler deeper off the edge. As it turns out, I managed to boat a 15 inch walleye on our second pass at about 6:20 and we made the decision to stick with it for the night. This set us up for an exercise in patience that we had not put ourselves through since last year. We have consistently worked live bait this season, so pulling cranks for an entire evening can be a real test if the action isn’t steady. And the action was definitely not steady. The one walleye we put in the live well was probably just a random fluke for the conditions. It was partly cloudy… mostly sunny though, with a decent chop… a far cry from the dark and windy conditions on Sunday. Junior was getting edgy, but I kept trying to reassure him that as soon as that sun dropped below the tree-line the walleyes would come up on that bar. It was simply too bright early for the walleyes to come up and feed in that shallow water. So, like clockwork, by about 8:50 when the sun was dropping behind the clouds and trees another walleye hammered my shad rap. Junior had just lost his to a northern and put a purple shallow runner on. With two 15 inch walleyes in the live well, the race was on. We had 20 minutes of fishing time, enough for two or three passes along the area we had been working and we needed two fish. Fortunately Junior’s fishing rod started to heat up… he boated a 14 incher on the first pass. He pulled in a cigar-lengthed walleye on the next one, then a big fish on the third that turned out to be a wandering northern. By 9:18 we were one fish short and four minutes from the landing… enough for one last pass. As we reached the end of the run Junior latched on to our last fish… a 14 inch keeper. We netted it, dropped the rods and kicked it down for the landing with our four fish… our goal for the night.
At the landing it was apparent that most had found a fish or two. The guys that pulled out ahead of us we on fish all night, but like us couldn’t find anything really large. They did, however, manage to weigh about half a pound more than our 3.5. At the scales another team that was working the deeper edge of the same hump we were on came in with two pigs. One about 4.8 pounds and the other only slightly less… definitely first place for the night. When the last team weighed their big fish… a 5 pound hog, we dropped to fifth place. Good enough for 11 points and, more important, enough to put us in fourth place overall by one point.
For the first time in four years we find ourselves with a shot at the fish-offs. There is a big cluster of teams hovering around the 90 point mark, so the last two nights are going to be very interesting. If we can keep catching fish, we have a shot. At the very least we have a great chance of reaching our yearly goal of breaking 100 points. Stay tuned as we spend a few nights fishing the last two lakes on the board. Next week will be the small lake we fished in this post where we managed to find a nice 25 inch fish (this lake regularly produces some very nice fish). The final night will be on Lake Bemidji. This should be fun.
Comments are closed.
