Walleye Fishing League Episode 8 – Return to Reality
We took a couple of weeks off for some traveling, golfing and general family time. Always nice to get a break from work and the regular routine, but we were definitely ready to get back to fishing this week.
As a tune-up, we headed north of town a few miles late last week to scope out one of the league lakes we haven’t fished yet. This lake is notorious for some big walleyes, but it has been spotty this year. My son and I have established a habit of using different baits when we have no clue what might be working on a particular lake, and this evening I pulled a rig with a leech, and he pulled a rig with a crawler. The results were less than stellar. Granted, we tried a couple of new spots and were learning the structure, but when we went back to more familiar territory the action was no better. The highlight of the evening included this excellent specimen of a bluegill:
And a fine summer evening rainstorm to blow us off the lake. No walleyes.
Last night we decided to give a nearby lake a try. We rarely fish it, but it’s close, and it’s another league lake that we haven’t fished yet. This time I pulled a rig with a crawler and Junior hooked up a leech. I struck first with a little banana-sized walleye in about 12 feet… just on the south end of a nice sized mid lake hump. We worked that area the entire evening moving about .5 mph with leeches and crawlers on a plain hook and a 3 foot snell. The result was about a half dozen nice little eater fish:
We did make a switch to crankbaits at about 9:00 just to see what we could scare up, and the boy managed to hook into a decent 17 incher, but that was the end of it.
So with a little bit of success in our back pockets we headed into league tonight with some confidence. The lake that was pulled was not one of the lakes we had fished. We’ve had modest success on this lake with a few small fish, so we were not boiling over with excitement. With no real good idea what the fish were after, we bought a dozen red tailed chubs, crawlers and leeches. I decided that I would do some jigging tonight. We found a few fish deep last time jigging so I figured it was worth a shot. My son went to crawlers on a lindy rig. He also gave a spinner a shot.
With raindrops spattering us yet again, we worked a little point of cabbage on the east side of the lake, drifting over with the wind, and backtrolling into the wind on the way back. We managed to boat two walleyes in the 12 inch range, a few northerns and a couple of perch. We were marking fish all over on the Lowrance, but could not get them to hit the bait with any consistency. By 8:40 we’d had enough and decided to switch to crankbaits to see if we could entice a reaction bite out of one of the finicky walleyes. All we could manage were a couple more northerns off the bullrushes in about 9 feet. On our last pass along a long weed line Junior hooked into a decent fish, got it to within 4 feet of the boat, and before we could get a good look at it, the dirty bugger threw the hook. This is the stuff that keeps walleye fishermen awake at night.
With a good bit of mumbling, we put the rods down and buzzed back to the landing trying to convince ourselves that the last fish was a northern. There was mixed success this evening with a couple of boats coming in with their four fish, but I would have to say most were only able to weigh a fish or two and a few of us weighed nothing.
So we roll into the last five weeks of the season needing to average a top 5 showing every night to break 100 points for the season. We’re probably sitting at about 52 points right now after 8 weeks with two blanks under our belts, so while the task ahead is not impossible, it won’t be easy. My guess is that we will be doing a good bit of fishing on the remaining lakes in the next week or two and hopefully will find a few hot spots to hit when we pull them for league. Until then, we’ll lick our wounds and move on.
[...] my last post, I mentioned that we did some fishing on a couple of area lakes that we had yet to fish on a league [...]
[...] To be quite honest, we had set a goal early to break 100 points, and after our poor showing back in week 8 we knew that we had our work cut out for us. We had to average 10 points the rest of the way and we [...]