Give The Fish What They Want & How They Want It

Tight Turns

Compared to other forms of walleye trolling, where you might have 200 feet or more of line out, a typical spinner presentation involves much less line. Therefore, unless conditions are unruly, relatively tight turns are possible to repeatedly present spinners in a small area. Tight turns not only bring your bait past a group of fish more times in a short period, but also allow you to experiment with speed and depth on one group of fish.

“I turn left and right as I go through the fish,” Wood says, “and I also try accelerating a bit, which lifts the spinners higher, in case some fish are rising. As fish rise off bottom, they’re most likely looking for food. And trolling below rising walleyes is ineffective.”

Refining Boat Control

Most anglers would do better if they paid closer attention to boat-control details. “The mistake the average person makes,” Hall says, “is just to drift along, not noticing the little hard-bottom area just passed over, or that he’s moved out into deeper water.

“If you pay attention to the little things, your boat control will follow. Notice if the wind blows you off the breakline. Don’t assume you’ll eventually run into a fish by luck.”

Sometimes, deliberately maneuvering up and down the breakline can mean more fish. Wood, for one, is a believer in the effectiveness of such a presentation, but he, like Hall, says it’s a matter of doing it on purpose. “You can’t do the drunken sailor thing and claim you’re moving up and down the break,” Wood says, laughing. “But it can be deadly. For one thing, you might not know exactly what depth the fish are at, but you can follow the break while you’re searching.”

I still think, however, that pulling the bait off the top of the break and fluttering it down or bringing it up from below the fish can, at times, be better than just pulling it straight along the contour. “A lot of the big fish I’ve caught,” Wood says, “were lying in ambush off a lip, and they hammered the bait when it came floating down off the top of the break.”

Precision on Suspended Fish

“A bottom bouncer doesn’t have to be fished on the bottom,” Wood says. “I often work out a formula that allows me to present a spinner rig to suspended fish. Doesn’t matter where the fish are or the depth of the water. If walleyes are showing up at 20 feet over 90 feet of water, I find a 20-foot flat and work out a formula based on bottom bouncer weight, length of line out, and boat speed. I establish a productive combo that ticks bottom in 20 feet, and then I simply move out over deeper water.

Suspended can mean elevated off bottom, too. If your bait is tight to bottom and the walleyes are three feet up, you’re too deep. Again, it’s a matter of paying attention to detail. Note on your depthfinder when fish are rising up, and either speed up or lighten your bouncers slightly.

Now it’s time to get out there and start controlling your own boat while these ideas are fresh in your mind. n

*Mark Strand, a freelance writer from Woodbury, Minnesota, has written articles for In-Fisherman magazine and also helped compile the In-Fisherman Ice Fishing Secrets book.