Post Spawn Walleyes - Putting Principles into Practice
So last week I wrote about the challenges of post spawn walleyes - how do you find fish during a cold water period after the spawn? We fished again yesterday on a lake that has a really good walleye population and for four hours, we didn’t get a walleye bite! We were getting ready to quit when we decided to try a couple of new areas. Here’s what we did:
We hit a lot of areas. We covered water. We threw jerkbaits and rippin raps and jigs with plastics. We found the vast majority of the water to be fishless.
We didn’t target typical structure. We hit shallow, dark bottom bays. We looked at water temps. The spot where we found fish was the warmest water on the lake - almost 55 degrees.
We finally contacted fish. You fish til you find them. After 4 hours, we hooked our first walleye on a plastic - it was a short bite - and the fish came unpinned. We kept moving and eventually found one - and when we found one - we found all kinds of fish.
After four hours of nothing - we had an hour and a half of some amazing fishing. We caught and released almost 15 walleyes (kept a couple for a meal), a crappie, and a bunch of smallies. It’s famine until you find them and then it’s a feast. We learned a lot in our experience and we have named the experience after the name of a local lake where we experienced the same thing this year: most of the lake was one here, one there…and then we found a pile of fish. As always - the key to fishing is finding them. In that location, we had the warmest water temps, bait and wind blowing. I was super thankful for a great trolling motor with my new Garmin Force. The anchor lock feature is the best of any of the brands I’ve used over the last 5 years (I’ve fished with an Ultrex and a Xi5 and the Force is the best by far). Love to hear your experience with post spawn fish - share your tips with me!