Finding August Walleyes

Going to Lake Holcombe this weekend. It is a flowage. average depth is maybe 15 feet. We usually try to stick to the river channel but haven’t had great luck finding walleyes in any great number or with great consistency. How would you go about covering as much water as possible and finding active fish?

I don’t remember if you can troll on Holcombe or not. If so, that’d be the way to cover water. I’d look for the sharpest breaklines you can find leading to the deepest water you can find. Those fish will likely sit in the deeper water during normal daylight hours waiting to move up onto shallower sand flats in low light to feed.

That’s not to say they won’t smack a crankbait or spinner harness buzzing by their heads while they’re in deep water.

Here is a totally different approach. I live on Big Stone Lake which also is an old river turned lake. I catch a ton of eyes during late summer in less than 5 FOW, throwing plugs over the top of shoreline weeds.Water temp close to 80 and these fish still live in the shallows all day long; sun or no sun. Just something to think about.

To piggy back on bck’s idea, someone on here recently wrote an article about fishing walleyes in the weeds shadow, it was titled “welcome to the jungle” great read.

I can tell you what didn’t work for me last weekend. Small very clear lake (27′ seci disk rating) in northern MN, I trolled deep open water, 30-40′ looking for bait fish, ran plugs 20-25′ down, never contacted walleyes. I did catch some bonus pike however.

Good luck, let us know how you do.

Another thing to try on those shallow weed walleyes this time of the year is to throw a jig/safety pin spinner twister tail right in those weeds and work it through them.
Cabbage beds are awesome for this!

dd

How can you tell what is cabbage? and what kind of jig is best for this type of fishing for walleyes?

I’m thinking I will have to fish the same way for eyes on Leech this weekend and am new to it.

Safety pin spinner?

Thanks!

I know this is going to sound really old, but my x-father in law used to throw a black mister twister tail on a black head with the yellow eye and woop my tail every time. i would never give him the satisfaction of trying it. i had a tackle box with all kinds of raps, jigs, tubes and he would always kill me with catching more fish then I would with a stupid old mister twister tail and a black jig head. Best part of the divorce is I now own a crap load of black tails and black jig heads, and he has no idea…

good luck

Sorry so late with a response. I was on vacation and just got back a day or two ago. Cabbage weeds grow pretty tall but not all the way to the surface and they have broad leaves. Safety pin spinners are like what you have on beetle spin lures. You can change out the jigs and rig them with whatever you want. Those type of spinners are great multispecies lures and come in a variety of sizes.

dd

dd

O never have tried the safety pin but that is a good idea. We found a lot of 10-12 inchers in the weeds we were using light jigs with half of night crawlers. Would like to have found some larger fish but it was fun none the less. We also caught some nice slabs and a few smallies