The LaCrosse Area Walleye club had a club outing scheduled for the mighty Pete on 7/16 so 3 of us set out on Friday the 15th to see if we could find some fish for the outing.
We got on the water around 8:30 am, and went to our first trolling pass. After catching two channel cats in the first 5 minutes, we pulled a fat 24″ eye on the edge of the channel in about 13′ of water on a Hot n Tot ran about 9 feet down. We made a few more passes with just another short to show for our efforts.
We moved about a mile upstream (which is about a 3 mile run on Petenwell since you have to follow the channel to the other side of the lake if you don’t want to end up in 3′ of water full of stumps). We started trolling a horseshoe bend in the channel and immediately pulled a 19-3/4″ eye. We spent the rest of the day fine tuning this pass. Over the course of the day we ended up with 5 slot fish, 21,21,23,24,25 some legals, many cats, some big crappies and some short eyes.
Saturday we arrived and were on the water by 7:30 am. We had 7 boats, and we formed a caravan and headed to the channel bend. We didn’t have any lines in the water when we saw two of our boats land their first catfish of the day. The slot fish weren’t as fast and furious as the day before but our group still had 5-6 slots. My boat had a 23-1/2″, my dads boat had two 21″s, and big fish of the day went to Chris and Joe with their 25″ (I’ll see if I can get a pic of that one to post later).
Most fish were found right on the edge of the channel, and about 8-9′ down. We caught fish on Hot N Tots, Walley Divers, Jointed Shad Raps, Flicker Shads, and Regular Shad Raps. The fish seemed to be pretty spread out with one here and there. Trolling speeds were anywhere from 1.7 to 2.5 mph.
Another highlight of the day was running over big carp and sturgeon with our boards, and having them take off on contact and create an explosion of water at your board. This happened to my boat at least 5-6 times on Saturday.
