The Eyes Have It

Another long weekend should have had plenty of boat traffic, but surprisingly not! Ed and his nephew Dan met me at 7:00 and we went in search of walleye. They were hoping to take some home and I didn’t want to disappoint them. Cooler air and zero wind greeted us for the start, but that wasn’t what I wanted. The first three spots proved to be useless but the 4th one was definitely holding some fish. The water temps fell below 70 degrees overnight and I was seeing terrible hits once again. Short rips or just a few clicks of the reel had me throttling down to lock them up. In fact some of the eyes never even made a sound. They were just found when I checked the lines! I was marking a number of fish here and decided to concentrate on trolling this spot for a while. Dan & Ed managed to boat a number of walleye and things were coming together. Once this place stopped producing, I moved to another and unfortunately just one walleye was added to the livewell. There were a number of northerns and smallies caught but that wasn’t what we wanted. I really covered water looking for more but came up short in all but a few places. By mid afternoon I headed back to the one area that had put out the bulk of the walleye and picked up a few more. After it slowed again, I decided to try drop shotting to see if they could get some of the more negative fish. Dan had wanted to learn how to do this and was a fast learner as he hooked up quickly. They both caught a bunch of aggressive smallies that put up great battles. Although not what we were after, fun nonetheless! Dan even managed to get a small walleye, but it was just under the slot and returned. I wanted to put them on more walleye and moved to another spot to drop shot again. Here too they landed smallies and Dan brought to net a good keeper eye. Ed also hooked a good one but lost it before it was at the boat. We fished for a little longer, then I tried to see if I could locate the sturgeon schools again. Unsuccessful at this and with a storm approaching, we decided to get off the water. It had been a productive day with a bunch of fish landed and some of them were even going home for dinner. We timed the take out just right because it was upon us as we left the ramp. Another good timing thing I guess!