After a few weeks of my focus being on bass fishing, it was nice to get a break from the tournament scene last week to fish around home and catch some fish to eat.
I had a few guide trips booked and most of the clients wanted to fish for walleyes. I was quite excited to change things up and cook up a couple of shore lunches.
Having not fished for walleyes on Lake of the Woods in a few weeks, I wasn’t sure what to expect early last week. But with three guests piled into my boat, we spent a little bit of time driving around, looking at my Humminbird machines before we finally dropped a line in the water.
It didn’t take long to figure out that the fish were shallower than I had been catching them earlier in the summer, mostly in 20-24 feet of water.
We caught enough fish for lunch on the first spot, as well as a couple of bigger fish that were released.
We then spent the rest of the day moving around trying different spots, looking for a big fish. The biggest of the day ended up being a 26.75-inch walleye–a nice one but certainly not a giant.
Our routine was to pull up to an offshore hump or point, then look around on the edges in 20-30 feet of water. Once we found a school of fish, we would get on top of them and drop either a jig and minnow beneath the boat or a jig tipped with a plastic minnow.
We would stay on a spot for 15-20 minutes, catch as many of the active fish as we could, and then carry on to the next spot.
On following days, I was able to simply pull up to the waypoints of the really good spots and catch them again.
All of the locations we were fishing were main lake humps and points. These places stay good right through fall and into winter; the fish just move a little bit deeper as we go along and the water starts to cool.
Another thing to keep in mind was the best humps were close to deeper water (50-foot-plus stuff). The best ones also had good flats on them in the depths the walleyes were in.
It seems like the humps and points that were really steep are not as good. We call them volcano rocks and they never seem to hold fish as well as the flatter spots.
As we move into fall, walleyes also start to show up in some of the mud bottom bays just off the main lake or main current in rivers. Mud flats in the 25-35 foot range are good and you often will find crappies in the same spots.
These are places where it’s worth driving around, using your electronics because if you can find a little bit of rock on these flats, they usually are magnets for schools of walleyes.
Since most of the fish seem to switch their preference to eating minnows in the fall and winter, live minnows seem to out-produce everything else. But jigs tipped with soft plastic minnows like the three-inch Northland Impulse Smelt Minnow can work, as well.
The key with the plastic is to jig it more aggressively than you would with the live bait because you don’t want the fish to be able to inspect the bait. You create a reaction strike with the aggressive jigging.
The previous week when we were on Rainy Lake for the International Falls Bass Tournament, we caught a bunch of nice walleyes in the low-20 foot range there, as well.
Walleyes seem to be biting across the region so take advantage of the few remaining nice days that we have and catch a few fish.
The bass tournament scene gets going again this weekend on Lake of the Woods with the annual Bassin’ For Bucks tournament running out of Sioux Narrows. It’s always a fun event that is supported very well by the community.
Weigh-ins will be taking place Friday through Sunday starting at 3:30 each day.
Fort Frances Times
Local News from Across the Rainy River District
