08/06/13 St. Croix River fishing for walleye and sauger has been surprisingly good considering it is the first part of August. The dog days are here and normally the walleye can be struggle to find. However there is a nice year class from 14.5 to 15.25 inch walleyes in the Croix that are biting as of late.
In case you don’t know the legal keeping length is a 15 inch minimum so there are tons of “shorts” and it is an easy 3 to 1 ratio of shorts to keepers, but heck its fun catching them anyway.
Saugers are also biting okay, but a little slow for this time of year. We did see nice 18 inch saugers about ten days ago but now the good keeper saugers are from 14 to 16inches. Also saugers can be any size to keep.
The river has a strong algae bloom right now, and I can’t say that it is all that pleasant. Naturally the river flows so certain areas harbor this green stuff more than in other areas, where say in the middle of Lake St. Croix the algae is not too thick at all.
If you are looking for new presentations from me on what is working it is the same as weeks before, I am livebait rigging with crawlers (mainly crawlers very little leeches) and trolling Rapalas to take the fish. Best depths have been from 20 to 30 feet.
Very brief white bass activity is happening on the surface and it is a far cry from what it used to be, I really long for the days where you would see these “silvers” busting on the surface the whole river wide and it they were so easily caught… dyas gone by….
Channel cats are biting on the livebait rigs, but they are really small.
River level is 675.5 and water temp is 74 degrees down from 80 two to three weeks ago.
Images:
Me holding Terry’s nice walleye
Bonnie and Terry with a 10 fish eye and sauger stringer
Bonnie with a HUGE Buffalo – This fish was the highlight of the trip, it went ape. fun.
