Fantastic Tactics Produce Fantasy Walleyes

According to walleye pro Tommy Skarlis, “The key to tracking down these roamers on the Great Lakes is to cover lots of water, which basically eliminates unproductive water. Planer boards allow you to make wider swaths with baits to track down schools of fish.

“I basically start by making long trolling passes in order to find different schools of fish. Once I catch a fish or two, I then troll a crisscross or X-pattern in order to determine the size of the school and which direction the school may have shifted, depending on the wind direction and speed,” Skarlis says.

“I also do a lot of S-turns and circles, where I swing back around to troll back over a pod of fish,” Skarlis says. “In order to turn sharp or make a circle, you need to space your boards. I space mine about 30 feet apart and keep them out quite a ways from the boat—say 75 to 120 feet. Keeping the boards out ensures that I’m not spooking the fish with my boat.”

Walleyes often travel in schools, and multiple strikes are common once active fish are located. Punch in their location with an icon on your GPS. When you troll past a school of fish, pick up lines, move back upwind of the school, reset lines while approaching them, and catch even more.

Another popular method for positioning baits deep is using diving planers that attach in-line between the line and the lure. The angled diver face dives deep, pulling the lure along with it. Some planers also can be set to run at different angles out to the sides, allowing for a spread of lures at different depths and distances from the boat. Changing line length adjusts lure depth without having to retrieve the rig. A strike trips a trigger, de-angling the face of the diver, which reduces water resistance and allows you to fight the fish. Use a rubber snubber between the diving planer and leader to absorb shock, and run a 4- to 6-foot heavy mono leader to the lure.

Due to the extreme water resistance of divers, heavy 8- to 10-foot, long-handled trolling rods placed in rod holders and 20-plus-pound line are necessary. But divers take lures deep, to 50 feet with mono, deeper with superline or wire, and they can be used at speeds exceeding 4 mph for spoons or some crankbaits. Avoid deep-diving lures; spoons, crawler harnesses, and shallow cranks run fairly level behind the planer, but deep-diving cranks dip below it, pulling down the back of the diver, resulting in a loss of diving depth.

Walleyes hugging bottom often are less active, if not inactive. These bottom-huggers are prime candidates for banging heavy three-ounce bottom bouncers, big-bladed spinners, and nightcrawlers to stir them into activity. Using heavy bottom bouncers allows you to keep the bouncers tracking at about a 45-degree angle while slowly trolling forward at about 1 mph. The heavy bouncer banging and stirring up bottom sediment seems to help attract walleyes and possibly even help get them active enough to strike.

These great presentations have been proven productive for catching Great Lakes walleyes by some of the best walleyes anglers in the world. Time on the water is really the only way to learn and fine-tune them well enough to start catching giant ‘eyes. Mastering presentations, locating fish, then selecting the best presentation for conditions is the best way to catch big ‘eyes in the Great Lakes. There aren’t many things that feel better than that initial strike and the weight of a whopper.