Walleye Fishing League Episode 9 – I Swear They Were Here Yesterday
One hard lesson that we never seem to hear from the walleye fishing experts is that walleye, while they have some predictable patterns fishermen can use to find them, have an annoying habit of not showing up in the same place they were just a few nights before. If we accomplished anything in the last week, it was doing a thorough job of proving this simple fact.
In 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 night. This past week, Junior and I headed back north to the lake we struck out on a week earlier. Our goal was to mark a couple of mid-lake humps on the Lowrance and then fish a long point with crawlers and leeches on lindy rigs. This strategy bore some fruit right away when the boy hauled in a nice 19 fish about 10 minutes into our first run. The victim was a medium sized leech on a plain red hook pulled on a three foot snell.
We continued backtrolling west to the end of the point and kept moving across a narrow channel to a point on the west side of the lake. We worked along that point in about 15 feet when Junior got another whack. It was obvious when he set the hook that he had a substantial fish. After a little bit of back and forth, I dipped the net under this 25 inch beauty:
So… like good fishermen… we marked the spot and continued working around it. We boated a few more fish, including this 18 incher fooled by a crawler:
So as we headed into league night, we had successfully located fish on two of the possible four lakes we could possibly pull. As “luck” would have it, we pulled the lake I discussed in last week’s post. That night we managed several keepers, and a few nights later found a couple more pulling shad raps. So we were fairly confident going in that we would find a few to weigh.
Once again we used leeches and crawlers working the same mid-lake hump we fished the previous week. We were getting some consistent bites, but not much to show for it. The wind was pounding the north side of the hump so we focused on that and were soon rewarded with a nice 18 inch walleye. Encouraged, we backtrolled and drifted along that edge picking up several small walleyes over the next half hour or so. Unfortunately, none of them were keepers.
By 7:30 we bailed on lindy rigs and started pulling shad raps. We knew that they had been working during the week, so we figured we could at least pick up one more keeper before weigh-in. But as I stated at the beginning of this post, the fact that the walleyes were there yesterday means very little today. Two hours of pulling cranks through shallow water produced one northern pike, one rock bass, and one sub-13 inch walleye. So, once again, we rolled to the landing braced for a middle-of-the-pack finish. As we pulled up to the dock we learned that one boat had three. I jumped out and headed to the truck to learn that another boat found five nice fish. As I backed the trailer down to the dock I watched another team with a bucket of fish with the tail of a big one hanging out the end. I strapped down the boat while Junior headed to the scale with our 18 incher. After getting the boat squared away I headed over to the scales and learned that our 18 incher was good for fourth place and 12 points. A slow night indeed, but we met our goal for night and a glimmer of hope for the last four. Stay tuned.
Pink hook, not red.
I stand corrected.
[...] 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). [...]
[...] Lake Julia for the night. One of my favorite lakes for pulling out a big walleye like the one in this post from last [...]