There’s More Than One Way to Skin a Cat (or Catch a Walleye)

I recently returned from a 4 day trip to Vermilion Bay Lodge with my brother, Greg.  We fished Eagle together for the first time last year and did well on walleye by pitching jigs into weeds and pulling cranks over deep sand grass.   As anyone who has fished for awhile knows, each year comes with a unique set of conditions that can have dramatic effects on water and fish location.  This year the early ice-out and warm weather presented us with green water, fewer weeds and warmer than usual water temperatures.

We started fishing similar spots and using the same techniques as we did a year ago.  We caught fish but the walleye were fewer in number and size.  During a pow-wow with Gord and a few regular guests (thank you, Andy) it was suggested that we work deeper water using crawler harnesses behind bottom bouncers, a technique that was producing well over the previous few days.  Good advice for sure except that I really prefer artificials.

The next day we started looking for fish in 25 to 35 feet of water and found that many walleye were appearing on the graph and were spread over a large area.  This made me happy because it was an ideal set up for pulling unweighted cranks on long lines, something I do often for post-turnover, bottom related muskies.  Once we found the right lures, line length and speed to keep our baits running between 25-27 feet down we consistently caught fish.

The key to this technique is to get your bait in the strike zone.  Lure style, color, size, action, etc. matter not if you are running at the wrong depth.  We used this technique several times at various times of day during our stay and always did well.  Lure color and style did not seem to matter as long as they ran at the right depth.

One of the nice benefits of trolling larger crank baits for walleye is the chance it gives you for large fish, be they eyes, pike or even muskie.  We caught one nice northern and Greg had a strong hit that resulted in a bite-off.  On our last evening of fishing we were pleasantly surprised to catch a large muskie that took over 20 minutes to land and gave us both a great memory.

The last hour of our trip we caught several more walleye.  Around us were two boats trolling crawlers at about one mile an hour, another boat slowly dragging Lindy rigs and Greg and I speeding along at 2.0-2.2 mph with our cranks and we all were catching fish.  You have to love Eagle Lake and Vermilion Bay Lodge!