Walleye Fishing League Episode 13 – Photo Finish
With a week to do a little pre-fishing on Lake Bemidji we headed out into some interesting weather with the goal of locating a few likely spots to find four good fish for the Tuesday night finish. The fishing has been pretty good lately, so finding fish wasn’t too big a problem. Our main concern was finding places where the fish were a bit larger. A stiff west wind and bouts of rain provided conditions that were perfect for some shallow fishing… so we went shallow.
With winds in the 20-30 mph range boat control was a real issue for live bait on a rig. We managed to find a couple of decent sized fish on live rigs, but each night we opted to cover more ground with shad raps as the sun crept below the horizon. We moved from one spot to another adding and removing them from our list of possibilities for Tuesday night. The places that we could find fish above the 16 inch range made it to the top. We felt confident when the weekend was over that we could find four keeper fish, but we were just as sure that the team we were trailing by one point would find four fish as well. They had proven over and over again that they could find fish on some of the toughest nights, so it was probably going to come down to one good fish. We were ready, but we needed some luck.
When Tuesday rolled around the weather had cleared and the wind died down, two things I really didn’t want to see. The bright sun and lack of chop would kill our plans for fishing shallow early, but as the day wore on the wind picked up out of the southwest until the whitecaps were rolling hard at the north end of the lake. Unfortunately, threatening weather was also in the forecast, so the raingear had to come out again. The scenario as we headed out was clear; we needed to gain a point on our competition to achieve at least a tie and a place in the fish-offs. The tiebreaker would be total weight and we had that by three pounds. Before we headed out we planned to do a little jigging with small red tails on a little hump at the north end. We found a few fish there the previous night, so we gave ourselves a time limit of an hour or so before we headed south. With a nasty wind rolling into that end of the lake, I had my hands full just keeping the boat in line. Junior had to carry the load at the front end while I hid behind the wave whackers at the back end. After getting bounced around for a half hour or so we finally managed to jig up a 13 incher. We were on the board… but barely. 13 inchers were not going to get it done. Fortunately, after another 15 minutes or so of bouncing Junior hooked into a 16 incher… half-way home, with some work to do. It was only 7:00 and we were feeling good about taking our chances pulling shad raps on some of the humps we had on our list. So we headed south.
After a kidney-pounding ride south we settled down on a bar that juts out from the western shoreline. We found a couple of decent fish on it a couple of days before, but nothing since, so we planned to only make a couple of passes over the top of it then move on if we didn’t find anything. As it turns out, it was quiet again tonight so we opted to move on rather than waste more time. From there we moved to the big mid-lake flat we always fish. About 10 seconds after I slowed the boat and started trolling I latched into a 15 incher… three in the live well. We were getting comfortable, but not too comfortable knowing that we probably needed a bigger fish to score well. Another factor playing on the comfort level was a nasty looking weather front rolling in from the northwest. We were going to get pummeled, we just didn’t know exactly when. We continued circling the flats picking up small walleyes and one northern that kept Junior’s purple shad rap as a souvenir. We got tired of the small walleyes so we reeled up and headed to our next candidate. This little bar produced a 20 incher the night before, so we had high hopes. We tied up a couple of deep runners for this bar because we were working 10-12 feet. I hovered out in 20 feet and started the troll over the first hump when Junior got a solid whack. In a couple of minutes we netted a nice 18.5 incher. Not exactly a hog, but definitely a possible difference-maker. We officially had our four fish, but really wanted to make at least one upgrade on the 13 incher. As we started making our next pass the rain started sprinkling down on us and the wind got even worse. On our run back to the north end of the bar another walleye attacked Junior’s shad rap… 15 inches. We had our upgrade and what we figured would be at least 5 pounds of fish. Not stellar weight, but we figured we had found enough to be competitive given the current … terrible… weather conditions.
By about 9:10 we decided we better start the 10 minute run back to the landing at the north end of the lake. With big rollers at our back the Pro-V rode the tops and crashed into bottoms of successive rollers sending massive sprays of water over the front of the boat directly into my face. Something Junior found rather amusing. We made it back in one piece with enough time to pull cranks along the shoreline for a couple of minutes, an exercise that we often go through just to see if we could say we found a fish at the absolute last minute. But tonight we would have to take our chances with the four keepers in the main live well. Junior dropped me at the dock and a few of the other teams had come in to see how the last weigh-in fell… even guys who were completely out of the race. I had a brief chat with one of the guys on the team we trailed by one. They found four fish, but none of them were bigger than 16 inches. It was going to be interesting. Junior grabbed the bucket and hauled our catch to the scale. The big fish weighed 1.8 pounds… just shy of big fish for the night. Our total weight was 5.5 pounds. We all waited as the other team carried their bucket over. The total after they dumped their fish into the bucket on the scale was about 4.4 pounds. We did it. As it turns out, we took second place for the night and they took third. So after 13 weeks of fishing we both ended up with 116 points. It turns out that we actually had to go to the total weight tiebreaker to determine fourth place, and we had that by a mere three pounds for the season. A real shame that we couldn’t send five teams given the marathon nature of the league, but we go by the rules and the rules say 4.
So we close out our best finish in four years with our first trip to the fish-offs. Next week will feature our top four teams and the top four teams from Thursday night league. We all start with a clean slate and fish next Tuesday on a “mystery lake” and on Lake Bemidji Thursday night. Top total weight for those two nights wins it all. So instead of calling it a season, I will have two more updates for you next week. Stay tuned to see how everything shakes out!
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