An Alternative Walleye Reality

You can almost always catch walleyes from weedgrowth on Mille Lacs, and on most other classic walleye lakes like Mille Lacs; it’s just a question of how many and for how long it’s easy. Usually, for example, I can scratch a couple fish any time in July and August, but by that time the fish in this pattern are mostly gone—and the weedgrowth has become so difficult to fish through that you can’t get at the remaining fish.

Stringy weeds like eelgrass grow up high as the season progresses, and the stiffer weeds that stand up straight and are attractive to fish early begin to fall over, making it tough to fish through areas. At times at night when the fish hold high you can still make good catches over and through the tops of the weedgrowth, especially by late August, but that’s not the pattern we’re talking about here.

The Swimbait Connection

I want you to think about the connection between the swimbaits and good catches. Other anglers are fishing these weedbeds and sometimes do well with crankbaits. I often do well with #12 and #14 Husky Jerks on dark days when the fish are holding up higher. It isn’t unusual for muskie anglers throwing smaller jerkbaits to catch these fish. But swimbaits are the best overall answer I’ve found.

Mille Lacs is one of the great naturally productive walleye-perch lakes in North America. Year-classes of perch boom at times and this affects walleye fishing, although exactly how becomes an intricate story that depends on forage size and numbers as predator and prey move through the seasons. Skipping that for now for the sake of space, here’s what I’m seeing that might suggest why the swimbaits work so well, aside from the fact that the swimming motion of these lures is gigantically attractive to walleyes.

Consider last year, the 2008 season. In 2007, a huge year-class of perch hatches and last year those forage fish are an inch or so long in June. They are everywhere but especially concentrated in bays, and in the bays they’re especially concentrated around weedgrowth.

Often the sonar screen is blackened from top to bottom as I fish a weedbed. Looking down into the water, giant schools of perch pass the boat about every half a minute. One calm morning, there’s never a time I can’t look into the water and see perch shimmering by, never a time I can’t look far into the distance and see thousands of them dimpling the surface for as far as the eye can see.

Yet the plentiful walleyes in these weedbeds aren’t feeding on this bounty. The bigger fish that I catch, which must be released because they fall within a slot regulation, are always lean and pretty much stay that way into July. You can’t feel smaller forage in their stomachs—occasionally you can feel larger prey, presumably larger perch.

Last season we could keep walleyes less than 18 inches. I clean five fish and they also don’t have tiny perch in them, when you’d think all a walleye would have to do is swim with its mouth open, there are so many tiny perch. I also never see walleyes busting the surface feeding on perch, never see them chasing subsurface, either.

Apparently there’s something about the size of the perch that makes them unappealing to walleyes at this time. Surely it has something to do with the expenditure of energy per mouthful gained, because walleyes are constantly swimming right through giant schools of perch to attack 5-inch swimbaits, swimming right past thousands of tiny perch to eat swimbaits so large that most walleye anglers would never think to fish them.

The Alternative Reality

I think this is going on across the country a lot more than walleye anglers realize, and thus the situation is counterintuitive to everything most every walleye angler has learned. First, most anglers are heading deeper instead of shallower, looking for gravel and rock when they should be looking for weeds. And always—always—anglers are brainwashed to pick up something small, maybe tip it with livebait, and fish it slowly. Then, when things aren’t going well, they make the erroneous assumption that the fish are even more “off” than they thought—so they temper back even more, fishing even smaller and slower.

Meanwhile, I keep holding up these swimbaits, which are really no longer or larger than a #12 Rapala Husky Jerk, and anglers en masse reach for crosses to ward off this evil giant. If I have to watch another angler casting a 3-inch plastic twistertail on a quarter-ounce jighead I’ll scream.

Soft swimbaits like the Storm WildEye Swim Shad and the Berkley PowerBait Swim Shad are among the most remarkable tools to arrive on the fishing scene in the 30-plus years I’ve been in the business. They certainly are not magic—of course they don’t work all the time—but often enough they’re special in their ability to turn fish into eating machines. This is one of those times.

They also tend to get the big bite, meaning they consistently trigger larger fish, but not at the expense of getting smaller fish to bite. Too, everything that eats anything that swims bites them, meaning they aren’t just great for walleyes, but for smallmouths, pike, largemouths, wipers, stripers, redfish, and more.

They should be part of any walleye angler’s stock of lures. They are as core as crankbaits. As fundamental as spinner-rigging. As basic as any form of livebait-rigging. This noted, and given that most walleye anglers still have never used them, purchasing a few and fishing this pattern with them could well be the single biggest step forward that an angler might make to catch more fish this coming season—and for the rest of your life.

The great divide between the reality of walleyes being turned on by big swimbaits in situations where most anglers are fishing tiny stuff is entirely mind-made.