Cover More Water for Walleyes

Cover More Water for Walleyes by Bob jensen Cover More Water for Walleyes As summer progresses, especially on larger bodies of water, it’s an advantage to move quickly and cover large areas in search of walleyes. In small lakes, there aren’t as many places for walleyes to be holding, and often they will be near something on the bottom. In these instances, working live bait rigs or jigs with a more traditional slow presentation will be good. But when you’re fishing big water, you need to keep moving until the fish are found.

Here’s how you do it. Walleyes are often thought of as a fish that hugs the bottom, and in many bodies of water that is true. But there are plenty of places where walleyes feed on baitfish that suspend, and in the summer the walleyes will be where the food is. If they are eating baitfish that are ten feet off the bottom in thirty feet of water, you need to have your bait close to the level where the walleyes are. You want to keep the bait a foot or two above them: Walleyes are more likely to move up for a bait than down.

Another occurrence I’ve seen is when there is a bug hatch going on. These bugs hatch on the bottom of the lake and drift up to the lake’s surface. The walleyes will follow them up to the surface, eating the bugs as they move. In thirty feet of water, the fish could be ten feet below the surface. You need to keep a close eye on your sonar to detect these fish and their prey. On my Humminbird 798c it is possible to easily see the clouds of bugs or baitfish with marks nearby that you know are walleyes. Now that we’ve found the fish, we need to put a bait in front of them. When they’re suspended our lure choices are fewer.

Spinner rigs will be best in many situations. When the fish are close to the surface, they can get spooked by the boat going overhead. This is why planer boards are such an important part of the successful angler’s arsenal. Planer boards take your bait out away from the boat and enable an angler to avoid spooking the fish. Even in states like Minnesota that have a one line per angler law, planer boards will put more fish in the boat.

On a recent trip to Lake Mille Lacs in central Minnesota, rods with planer boards out produced rods without boards 6 to 1. That’s too much of an advantage to ignore. Off Shore planer boards with Tattle flags are easy to use and easy to read. Baitfish Spinner Harness’s come in a variety of outstanding colors. Everyone in the boat should try a different color until the best one is found.

Add a Gulp! crawler and start trolling. Just as color can be important, so can speed. Experiment with speeds, maybe start in the 1.3 mph range, and add or subtract weight between the spinner and planer board as you speed up or slow down to keep the bait in the fish zone. You may have heard that walleyes aren’t as active in the summer, but they’ll eat your bait if you put it in front of them. If you pull spinners behind planer boards in the summer, you’re going to put fish in the boat.