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.

I’ve caught lots of fish, some as deep as 30 feet, using the Deep Tail Dancers about 150 feet back of the boat, running 14-pound Berkley FireLine. I’ve also caught a lot of fish in shallow rivers like the upper Mississippi, right out our office backdoor, fishing the regular #5 and #7 Tail Dancers—a lot of big smallmouths, too. The main objective is to get the depth factor right—the fish are almost always on the bottom. Then work on getting speed right, always moving along in the beginning, as fast as the fish allow. The Tail Dancers are hot in this situation because they aren’t speed-sensitive like most other plugs. They work well dead slow or cranked up to past 5 mph.

I go with a 4- or 5-foot section of 20-pound Berkley Big Game monofilament as leader, attached to the 14-pound FireLine when I’m running the Deep Tail Dancers—a 15-pound section when I’m running medium-size lures, like the regular #7 and #9, dropping to 10-pound only for the smallest plugs. Big Game is one of the trustiest monofilament lines in the history of fishing.

I use the same rod-and-reel setup that I go with in open water, namely a Shakespeare Tidewater 15 line-counter casting reel on a 7-foot 6-inch Shakespeare Ugly Stik Lite Inshore rod, the CAI 1176-1ML. I like this longer slow-action rod for trolling with FireLine. Another advantage is price: You can rig four setups like this for the cost of one high-end combo. Still, the rods last half a lifetime and I have reels that are in their fifth year. A new lineup of reels, the Arsenals, replaces the Tidewaters in 2008.

As I’ve said, most river fishermen hit the water with a notion that runs deep, insisting on fishing with jig-and-minnow combinations, slipping current, or anchoring and casting, and at times fishing vertical from an anchored position. These are some of the most precise ways to get a lure to walleyes. At times it isn’t just the best way to catch fish, it’s just about the only way, especially in spring.

Yet, when conditions are right in fall—far more often than most anglers think—the best way to catch fish is the simple trolling solution I’ve laid out here. This is true from the Detroit River to the Niagara and St. Lawrence; from the Winnipeg, English, and Rainy to the Mississippi and Missouri; and from the Columbia to the Saskatchewan. Walleyes often are responding better to bigger baits. Fishing bigger and more aggressively maximizes the odds for contacting and catching more fish. This method also tends to select for big fish.

Working Open Water

Trolling plugs in open water is standard procedure on most portions of the Great Lakes. It should also be considered for most other walleye waters that have open-water forage, including classic natural walleye waters of the central portion of the country, and classic reservoir waters from North Carolina and east Tennessee, through the Midsouth and out West to Wyoming, Montana, and Washington.

At the same time that anglers are catching walleyes using standard jig-and-minnow and livebait-rigging techniques on structure in deep water, other walleyes—often overlooked—roam open water in search of suspended forage. If they aren’t in open water, they often are holding in deep basin areas, especially by late fall.

I use a simple setup that works for fishing open water everywhere I’ve fished across the country. Especially in clear to moderately clear waters, I limit the number of lures I have out to three or four—usually three. Slim sets often mean bigger fish, for a variety of reasons I’ve discussed in previous articles but won’t get into here.

In early fall, some fish often ride high—in the upper 10 feet of the water column—especially on dark windy days. Overall, though, most feeding fish hold from about 20 feet down to about 40. These depths are so standard that it must be based on a combination of similar factors including water clarity and light penetration that influences both baitfish position and, subsequently, walleye position, no matter where the water lies. Still, it’s a fundamental part of any fishing day to have to experiment to see where the fish are. This often changes as fish attitude shifts, based on weather and water conditions throughout a day or over the course of several days. I’ll provide an example of this a couple paragraphs farther on.

A Simple Spread Set (see below) shows how I often end up fishing. It’s always better to use hard-diving and hard-vibrating baits when possible, because they fish much more precisely than shallower-lipped baits like the #12 or #14 Rapala Husky Jerk or the Smithwick Suspending Rogue. It’s just a little harder to tell when shallow-lipped baits are running right.

When fish are riding high, you have to use those shallow-running baits. And at times on some water during some periods of the fall, fish simply want the shallow-running baits, although they must be presented where the fish are feeding in deeper water. That was true much of last fall on the Bay of Quinte. The two years previously, the fishing was tremendous just running the deeper-diving harder-vibrating baits.

Last season the fish wanted #12 Husky Jerks or 700 Series Reef Runner Ripsticks, run at depths from 18 to 35 feet. This can be easily accomplished by adding a snapweight of 1.5 ounces (or more) to the mainline. Perhaps it was because boat traffic was up 100 percent or more that the fish tended to be less aggressive than in previous years. The big experiment on the Bay was how far ahead of the lure the snapweight had to be added in order not to spook fish. Some anglers were running the weight as much as 300 feet in front of the lure. We did well with the snapweight 125 to 150 feet in front of our lures.

As you might expect, we found that the fishing could change in an instant, given changing fishing conditions. Throughout the day, it took shallow-running lures fished relatively slowly (at about 1.5 mph) to get the occasional big fish to bite. In the hour before dark, however, when the fish tended to be a little more aggressive, the Deep Tail Dancers run at 2 to 3 mph did just as well.

Throughout the period we fished that last week of November, most of the fish were holding over 60 to 100 feet of water on the big-lake side of Glenora Ferry. It seemed like few fish had moved into the inner portion of the Bay, where they so often hold over 20 to 40 feet of water in the vicinity of weededges near the town of Picton. Indeed, even anglers fishing after dark weren’t contacting any fish in this area, which usually is prime for fishing at night.

Our last day on Quinte, November 30, was a brutal weather day, with winds at about 30 mph out of the northeast, and intermittent driving rain. There wouldn’t be any fishing in most of what had been the main fishing area near Glenora Ferry, so we ventured out from Kevin Laver’s place, Merland Park Resort, in Picton. A bend to the southeast in the lower part of the bay made fishing barely possible in this somewhat wind-protected area of the Bay.

We motored slowly into heavy wind, turned and put out two shallow-running plugs to each side of the boat on planer boards, then set a deep diver directly behind the boat. We kicked the motor in and out of gear to keep the bow of the boat downwind. The force of the wind was enough to keep us moving at about 3 mph.

As we passed a point (shoreline-connected projection) in the Bay where the water went from 30 up to 25 feet and then back down to 30, the rod with the deep-diving plug pulled down hard. As I fought the fish, one of the other rods went down as well. Each fish weighed about 8 pounds. Reeling in the other rod to motor up and make another pass, we found it fouled with weeds or we might well have had a tripleheader.

Long story short: A huge school of fish was feeding heavily in the area of the point, suspended from 15 to 25 feet down. Although we made another pass like the first, we soon realized the shallow plugs on long lines far behind boards out to the side of the boat were unnecessary. At that point we just ran two rods, each with a Deep Tail Dancer, about 90 feet behind a board only 25 feet out to each side of the boat.

But the boards weren’t necessary, either. On our fourth pass we just ran a Tail Dancer 80 feet straight back on each side of the boat—and got bit on both rods almost every pass. In an hour, struggling arduously into the wind each time to reposition for a trolling run past the point, we caught more than a dozen fish that went 7 to 11 pounds. Then the conditions worsened and we quit.

Where had the fish come from? Had they moved the four miles or so from the Ferry area? Had they just been in the area the previous week or so but not feeding?

Typically in the situations I’ve mentioned, color can matter greatly or, in the last instance, probably not at all. But color only becomes a factor once the elements of depth control, speed control, and plug type have been solved. By far our best shallow-runner color was a Glass Rapala pattern called Glass Blue Minnow, although we also caught a few fish on the Ghost Minnow. Many other anglers working the Bay had narrowed the best Reef Runner colors to Eriedescent, Blue Prism, and Blue Chrome. Our best Tail Dancer color in previous years was Purpledescent, and this was the color we had on that day of frenzied fishing.

In water with marginal clarity, I believe in trolling multiple baits in a closer set that tends first to bring fish to the set, after which they decide which of the individual baits they want. This is another story I’ve already covered—in our August/September issue 2006, should you face those conditions where you fish this fall and be puzzled about how to proceed. Double-rigging including a spinner rig can be a top option in these waters. Back issues of In-Fisherman are available at 800/260-6397 or in-fisherman.com.

Casting Swimbaits

I’ve addressed the swimbait option many times before. It can be dynamite during fall in certain situations. Although I haven’t been able to do it myself, we have enough feedback from anglers around the Great Lakes to know what I suspected: That swimbaits are a top option from piers on Erie and on eastern Lake Ontario, fished at night in November and sometimes into December. They should be a superior option anywhere walleyes swim in near-shore areas on the Great Lakes.

I’m talking about using the combination of a Berkley PowerBait Swim Shad (5 inches), marketed as a saltwater product, coupled with an Owner Ultrahead Saltwater Bullet jighead weighing 1/2 or 3/4 ounce. The Owner heads are available online at ownerhooks.com or through the Bass Pro Shops Saltwater Specialties catalogue. The easiest place to get the Swim Shads, if they aren’t available in nearby tackle shops, is via the Berkley website at berkley-fishing.com. My favorite colors are Senorita, Rainbow, and Anchovy. If you look for an alternative jighead, make sure it has the longer shank necessary to handle the swimbait-style softbait body.

When these are cast with a medium-fast-action rod 7, 7.5, or 8 feet long, coupled with a little-bit-bigger reel (wider spool diameter) like a 35-class Pflueger Supreme, and filled with 14-pound-test Berkley FireLine or a top braid, the resulting exceptionally long casts allow contacting more fish more often from a stationary position on shore. This lure combination also is a good one in other shorefishing situations around North America, but use a lighter head (3/16 or 1/4 ounce) and a slightly smaller shad body, like the 4.5-inch Lunker City Shaker. To get the bait to fish slightly slower and shallower and to help it wiggle through remaining weedgrowth better, rig it with the body flat instead of up and down in what would be considered normal fashion.

The PowerBait Swimbait/Owner Head option isn’t just for shorecasting. I use it to quickly search the top of deep humps and the flat portions of deep points in lakes, reservoirs, and rivers, by making long casts and moving the bait along quickly 5 to 10 feet, before allowing it to swim back to the bottom. I can effectively search for big fish by making a half-dozen or so casts, while it would take several trolling passes and much more time to search the same spots by trolling.

When you’re searching like this, you’re trophy hunting, although you also catch plenty of lesser fish. Smaller fish eat this presentation just as readily as big fish, but big ones are more likely to eat this than many of the other standard presentations. On most waters a big fish or two a day isn’t bad, if they’re in the size category that makes your heart sing. Most anglers just don’t believe this and won’t stick with it for a couple hours or all day, yet they think nothing of trolling for days on end. Have you really ever given the swimbait option an honest shot?

The lure also works well late in the season over shallower weedbeds, once most of the weedgrowth that was bent over is flatter to the bottom, leaving just a few stalks of cabbage or strands of coontail sticking up. Again, move the lure along relatively quickly. If it hangs on weedgrowth, give the rod a good stiff snap to break through the weeds and keep it fishing clean. This works at times during the day, but tends to work best during twilight periods and after dark.

I’m certain that if wind conditions had been better the day we hit that big group of fish on the Bay of Quinte last November, we could have caught them steadily by casting the swimbait combo. I already know the fish on Quinte like the swimbait, because I’ve caught them on the bait at night and during the daytime in summer from along weededges. I’ve also caught a few big fish trolling the swimbait while we’re trolling crankbaits.

Casting Newfangled Spoons

Some of you will see this part of the article as a stretch. I’m suggesting here a presentation option without ever having caught a walleye on it. I think this suggestion is workable based on things I’ve seen this past spring and summer while fishing for bass. This hasn’t been addressed in any of our bass articles yet, so it’s the edge of discovery.

I’m confident after having been in the fishing industry for over 30 years, having seen a lot of major events and all of the most revolutionary changes in the sport; so I think I have a clue what might work and what might not, even though I haven’t actually proven it in the field. Want to help me try this?

Fish often go through a conditioning process of sorts when they’re heavily fished, then caught and released. I’ve been fishing Lake Fork, Texas, for largemouths the past 4 years, and it may be the most heavily pressured body of water for bass in the world. Over 350,000 anglers visit the lake annually, most of them to catch the big Florida-strain bass that live there.

On any given day, almost every day all year long, you can sit anywhere on the lake, look all directions, and see every obvious spot being fished by multiple boats. During spring even marginal spots may have as many as 10 boats working them, covering all possible patterns.