Walleye Week

After an excellent walleye start to this week, Douglas joined me today and kept it going. We decided on a 9:00 AM meet just to let the morning frost dissipate, before heading out. The weather was to be unseasonably warm today with temps to top out around 60 degrees. Sunshine and absolutely no wind would also join the day making it picture perfect! Water temps were hovering around 44.5 degrees and stable from the previous couple of days. Doug was in for a real treat with November conditions like these! We began by trolling a couple of baits along a drop and had our first rip in less than 5 minutes. He was officially on the board with a nice 19 inch walleye and definitely having fish for dinner tonight. With flat calm & sunshine, I knew our trolling window would be small. We kept at the troll for the first hour or so, and had limited action with only one other fish brought to net. We did have a few short rips that just ended in silence signaling that we should switch up presentations all together. I immediately pulled the plug and we went to casting jigs along the same break, hoping for better results. After missing a couple of strikes, Doug was tight to a real nice walleye and shortly after, in the net. He managed one other fish with the jig a little later, but it turned out to be a snagged sucker and we had a laugh. I wanted to try another area nearby to see if there were any other walleye interested in eating, so we reset the trolling lines and covered water. We must have gone close to an hour before one of the reels finally screamed and another walleye was locked up. Although it wasn’t the best conditions for trolling, we did manage to squeak one out and were happy to have done so. With the sun high and water visibility gin clear, we went to a drop shot & hoped for better results. In the last couple of hours there were about 6 more eyes brought to net but it was a tough bite. Although I had been marking them all over, they just weren’t very interested under these conditions. They would probably be biting much better just before dark but we weren’t hanging around to find out. Somewhere around 3:00 we decided to pull the plug and called it a day. Despite the difficult fishing, we had managed to land about a dozen good fish and he was taking a few of them home for dinner. As far as the weather goes, who could ask for anything more? Flat calm, bright sunshine and temps above 60 degrees don’t happen too often in November. It was just a perfect day to be out and catching fish was a bonus! I had been out the previous four days as well with similar conditions and loved it! There had been many fish caught with plenty of large eyes released as well. The run back to the ramp was absolutely beautiful as the mirror calm water was like glass with no other boats around. This would go down as probably the most pleasant fall day ever spent on the water and Douglas got to experience it. He would remember this one for a while!!