Select Best Options No Matter Where You Fish

Rainy Lake, on the border of northwest Ontario and northern Minnesota, sits centered in the walleye world, on an east-west line between the Columbia River fisheries out West and a few Connecticut fisheries in the East. It is a bellwether of the way things go sometimes on exceptional walleye waters. I’ve fished Rainy off and on for the last 25 years. Walleye fishing was good, and then it got bad.

When it got really bad, the commercial fishing went away. Meanwhile, fishery managers reduced angler bag-limits and put in place slot-limits. We could talk hard science here, but the walleye population rebounded more dramatically and more quickly than I’m guessing even fishery folks thought possible.

I have a friend—a good angler—who fished Rainy in 1996, stayed two weeks, and caught 10 walleyes. He returned in 2001, stayed a month from mid-June to mid-July, fished almost every day, and caught 1,200. The fishing on Rainy is just as good today—probably better, with the average fish bigger and more robust. There are a lot of nice pike, too. And the smallmouth fishing is high class.

As First Nation folks in the area exercise their right to net the Ontario portion of the lake, here’s hoping they do it with concern for sustainability. Life isn’t like a box of chocolates, Larry The Cable Guy says; it’s more like a jar of jalapeños—what we do today comes back to bite us in the butt tomorrow.

Rainy comes to mind, because several of the presentation options I’m about to discuss work well there—and I’m looking forward to going back to fish Rainy this fall. That’s the thing about this season, when we have a chance to catch bodacious fish, if we get to the right fishery at the right time, and then get the presentation part of the plan in tune. The options covered here play without reservation but with a little modification across North America.

After traveling much of North America the past 10 years, I think more walleyes are available today in many areas than there were, say, 15 years ago. This may be one reason that aggressive fishing tactics work so well today—more fish, more competition for food. Or it may be that there are more fish in a variety of areas that can best be searched using aggressive tactics.

One of my main teaching points the past half-dozen years has been that aggressive tactics should be the way we usually begin fishing. Then we can tinker with the equation as we go, tempering the process in favor of the finesse side of things if need be. Unfortunately, fishing vertically with jig-and-minnow combinations is an almost knee-jerk reaction to most situations for most of Walleye Nation right now. Much more aggressive tactics play forth more productively on most waters, and I think livebait, while it may never disappear, is a thing of the past, in a general sense. But every sentence is another story, every paragraph another book.

First and foremost on many waters should be the choice to troll with hard-vibrating plugs like the Rapala Deep Tail Dancers or the Reef Runner Deep Divers, as you move along at a steady clip, often as fast as 3 mph, even when water temperature dips into the 40°F range. This isn’t just true on the many walleye areas on the Great Lakes; it applies to rivers, natural lakes, and reservoirs across the walleye range, no matter if the fish are holding on structure near the bottom or running suspended in open water.

Trolling Rivers

I wrote about the plug-trolling option in rivers in our October/November magazine last year. Pick a deep diver that runs hard and true and gets to the intended depth, usually right along bottom. Run the plugs on long lines behind the boat as you move steadily forward against current. This also works in lake and reservoir areas with current—any necked-down areas.