After spending the winter in the southern U.S., chasing my fishing pursuits, it was nice to get home last week and catch the opening weekend of walleye fishing across Northwest Ontario. Growing up, like many of you, the third weekend in May usually revolved around trying to catch a few walleyes, often with some camping and rainy weather mixed in.
While there have been some nice May-long weekends over the years, most of my memories involve rain, wind and generally crappy weather. Still, we always had fun with fishing trips and the occasional camping adventure, regardless of the conditions outside. It’s a long winter for us so when we’re finally able to get in the boat in the spring, we were going for it.
The weather this past weekend wasn’t the worst I can remember but we did get a few showers and small storms that hit us. We didn’t do the camping thing but we did get out on Lake of the Woods to catch some walleyes. Fish were caught and we had an excellent shore lunch dinner, which I had been craving for months while I was down south.
Walleye fishing on the opening weekend is never as good as it gets throughout the rest of the year in my opinion. The water is still cold so the fish are a little bit lethargic and then they are just finished up with their annual spawning ritual so they are still recovering from that. We know that the majority of walleyes are going to be found in shallow waters, near spawning areas so that helps us narrow down where to look, they just don’t bite as good as they do in the coming weeks.
Still, fish can be caught. We experienced some solid fishing over the weekend but the challenge we faced was catching smaller ones to keep. Remember, Lake of the Woods has a new regulation this year that only allows us to keep four walleye under 43 cm, which is just a hair under 17 inches. Anglers could keep one walleye over 27 inches, but for eating purposes, I don’t think most folks want to eat a walleye of that size. We caught a bunch between 17 and 18 inches this weekend, which was fun.
We focused our efforts on traditional early season locations and caught fish between four and eight feet of water, on jig heads tipped with soft plastics. I typically use two types of plastic trailers on my jigs early in the season, a small swimbait like a Z-Man Slim SwimZ and a Ned rig bait like a Finesse TRD. I’ll cast the swimbait and cover water with it, looking for fish and then when I find where they are at, I’ll drag the Ned rig around slowly and pluck fish from small groups. The traditional jig and minnow still works great early in the season, but as I have preached for years, walleyes will eat soft plastics just fine as well. Most of the time I’m going with an 1/8 or ¼ ounce jig early in the season.
Walleyes are in predictable locations the first few weeks of the season. I’m really big on fishing smaller coves, especially if they have some sand (look for small beaches along the shoreline) and some wind blowing into them. A light wind will blow the warmer surface water into these coves and the walleyes usually like it.
I hope all of the walleye anglers out there have a great season in 2024!
