Customize Your Bladebaits For Bigger, Better Walleyes

Bobby Jacobsen of Moses Lake, Washington, lives an hour's dog trot from some of the most hallowed walleye water in the Pacific Northwest. This isn't just any walleye water. This is Moses Lake, Potholes Reservoir, the Columbia River, Banks Lake, Rufus Woods Lake, and Roosevelt Reservoir. Legends all, where 10-pound fish are so commonplace they're expected. Waters where you'll find Bobby Jacobsen just about every day.

When we recognized his brown Lund boat out on Potholes last October, Jacobsen was snapjigging bladebaits near the mouth of Lind Coulee. He'd caught several respectable 'eyes, including a 7-pounder.

For the uninitiated, "snapjigging" is a method whereby you violently snap the tip of your rod up a few inches, fast "waggling" that bladebait up from the bottom. "Let it free fall on a slack line back to the bottom," Jacobsen instructed. "Make sure it hits the bottom on every drop."

I did as I was told. My partner and I caught a few. But nothing like the 7-pounder finning with contentment in Jacobsen's livewell. Maybe it was me and my inherent limitations as a walleye angler (always a possibility). But then again, maybe it was the differences between our bladebaits.

I sided with the bladebait differentiation theory and commenced to peppering Jacobsen with questions not only about his bladebaiting methods, but also about the bladebait itself. I'd always figured a bladebait is a bladebait is a bladebait. The only real differences in the packaged blades I bought seemed to be weight, and a smattering of different colors. All bladebaits, my early thinking went, had the same shape, hooks, snaps, holes, and actions.

But I was more wrong than a blocked punt in your own end zone. The differences in a store-bought, ready-to-go bladebait, and a bladebait you create or customize down in your basement, is akin to the differences between a store-bought cake and a cake your sweetie labored all afternoon to make for you while you were out fishing.

STRAIGHT FROM THE PACKAGE

There's not a thing wrong with any of the commercial bladebaits you buy off the peg at your local tackle retailer. Well designed bladebaits include Heddon's Sonar, Luhr-Jensen's Ripple Tail, Bass Pro Shop's XPS Laser Blade, Wazp's Zounder, Cordell's Gay Blade, the Silver Buddy, Zap Lures' Minnow Style Blade Bait, Pope's Blade Baits, Reef Runner's Cicada and Bitzer Creek's Zip Lure. All are awesome walleye-getters.

But consistently successful fishing lives in the details, and expert walleye practitioners like Jacobsen know that a little extra something can and will make all the difference. If walleyes love bladebaits, so goes the theory, they'll love customized bladebaits, made just for them, even more.

A good example? Crappie fry tend to congregate around the I-90 bridge pilings at Moses Lake in fall. They all look like fishy little Dalmatians with all those little black spots so characteristic of crappies. The walleyes congregate, too, feasting on the crappie pups.

"I figured it out one year," says Jacobsen. "I took a chrome blade and made little dark spots on it with a magic marker. Looked just like a crappie." And to the walleyes, it looked just like a crappie, too. Jacobsen and his marked-up blades slayed 'em.

And that's just the beginning. Bladers have raised customizing their baits to a science. Coloring in eyes, using colored tape, marking up a brass blade with vertical black stripes to look like a perch, interchanging different kinds of hooks and snaps, pouring their own lead to make adjustments to weight, and even adding sparkle from nail polishes are all part of the high-level detail meant to maximize the duping ability of these lures.