Where Have All the Walleye Gone? Techniques to Stave Off the Malaise of Desperation While Fishing for Walleye Pathetically

It’s been a long, frustrating week of Walleye fishing here at Lake Vermilion. Ask any of the shopkeepers or check the Lake Vermilion Trading Company’s fishing report and they’ll tell you the Walleye are jumping into everybody’s boat, but, for our intrepid knuckleheads here at Outsider’s Almanac the results have been slightly less optimistic.

We’ve been hitting the lake twice a day for the past 6 days and have only brought home 3 fish worth eating that whole time. Yes, three. On Tuesday we caught 2 real nice sized Walleye and Wednesday we brought home a small mouth. Other than that we’ve been catching way too many pan fish, a bull head, and several smalll mouths that are just too appropriately named. We’ve been very generous to the fish here at Lake Vermilion supplying our scaly friends with all kinds of neat flourescent tub toys and essentially running a soup kitchen for wayward marine beasts. Fortunately, the scenery here is magnificent, the Bald Eagle population is plentiful and the Schmiddts is effective. But we came here to fish, so I’m going to try and make some late in the game adjustments and hope that we can go home with just a few Walleye under our arm to help support the boastful lying we’re eager to do.

In service of that I’ve been digging around trying to find some articles on fishing for Walleye that might add one or two previously ignored bits of information that will crack this bugger open for good. I haven’t found a ton of new information we’ve been following the common wisdoms – minnows for bait, down riggers or Lindy rigs with floats to keep the bait just floating off the bottom, jigs with crawlers or minnows, trolling off reefs, etc.

One of our problems may be that we’ve been letting our Lindy rigs sit too close to the boat. I came across this info here where the author gives 2 dozen tips for catching Walleye. The reason this one sticks in my craw a bit is that I nabbed a couple good sized fish this morning with a crank bait at a distance and now I’m wondering if that’s because the Walleye here might be a bit shy. He also mentioned that the Walleye like their fish awfully slow so we may be trolling a bit too fast and I may be reeling in my crank bait a bit more vigorously than desired.

There’s another fellow who has offered the sage advice of minimizing resistance of your bait. Apparently, Walleye eat by inhaling the water and the food around them and, because of this, if you don’t have enough available line your Walleye is going to short bite the bait and you’ll quickly become, like us, the Mother Theresa of the fish kingdom. So pump on retrievals, drift with the current on choppy days, and try a lighter line, something like 4-6lbs line.

This guy suggests a 3-way swivel in 15-25′ of water. This is not dissimilar to what we’ve been doing save for the suggestion of back trolling.

So we’ll try these out tonight, probably going over to Frazer Bay as suggested in the Trading Company’s fishing report and, if worse comes to the expected worse, we’ll have to settle for the Walleye Fish Fry they have every Friday at the Landing.