Favorite Walleye rigs and lures

What is your favorite walleye rigs and lures for catching walleyes!

It completely depends on time of year, what body of water and what kind of forage is available. If you’re looking for my favorite one to use (favorite way to catch them), it’s always going to be lures that I make myself. This could be crawler harnesses, some of my hand carved crankbaits, modified cranks or spinner blades. I enjoy every fish that I catch on a lure that I tinkered with or made twice as much as one I catch on a crankbait I just pulled out of the box.

I have favorites for pretty much every presentation I use. I will list them below.

Spring/Fall Rivers – Small jigs with Ringworms
Summer Rivers – Trolling Shad Raps/Wally Divers/Mean-Streaks or casting cranks
Summer Open Water Trolling – Reef Runners, Hand made crawler harnesses, or Streak Freaks
Summer Jigging – Big bulky swim baits
Late Fall/Early Spring on the river – three way with a stick bait slowly up stream
Ice Walleyes – Jigging Rapala, Buckshot spoon, Go Devil etc…

Pretty much any of these can be used at any of the other times, it’s just the how and where that each person has to figure out. Good luck.

Jig and 3″ curly tails in spring followed by trolling bottom bouncers with 8-10′ leader and thundersticks around mud and weed edges in the late spring early summer.

All things considered a Shap Rap number 7, especially in the spring and early summer. As summer comes it is Willow Cats and Crawlers, and then in the fall minnows and a jig.

My favorite is whatever the walleye want that day. I try not to fish memories and it has helped my fish numbers and size. I have guidelines I use depending on time of year and conditions but from there it is a hunt for what the walleye want, be it plastics,cranks or live bait.

Overall the Lindy rig is hard to beat. Very versitile and can be tweaked to cover most situations.

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Overall the Lindy rig is hard to beat. Very versitile and can be tweaked to cover most situations.

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Amen Don, I am with you on this one. It doesn’t matter what body of water you are fishing or what time of year, you can get the Lindy to produce. Oh, except I haven’t mastered it through the ice, YET!

Fuuny thing is I used to hammer Walleyes on Lindy Rigs and Bottom Bouncers through the ice back in college. No lie, Fishing the River below a little dam with the current. It was the only way I could get the bait near the bottom.

I still need to get this current fishing figured out. I spent my life fishing Lake Oahe without any current and it has been a rude awakening fishing the Miss.