fishing Report for April 14

Been out sucker fishing a bit, they aren’t quite running yet, but a few males are moving upstream. went out with a buddy one day and we ran out of bait, and kept 24 suckers, both redhorse, and white suckers. went out sunday with Jess and same thing, ran out of bait, but kept 20 of them. pretty fun.

Also last week I went out with the DNR to run fyke nets on the Chip, it was pretty cool to help with that. Got a few muskies, a 48 and 49 were the biggest, will post a pic up soon. Also got a bunch of walleye, but the bad thing is, only one female in 5 nets in 3 days was under 16.5 inches, not much for year classes coming up, pretty crazy, so the dnr is right about there being big problems for the chip in coming years for walleye fishing. we also got a walleye that was about 10 pounds which was cool. Water temps are in the low to mid 50’s.

Good luck,

Tanner Wildes

Hey Tanner I’m coming up to the Chip in August. This will be my first trip up there. Do you guide walleyes too? I think I saw that you did muskies but unsure about walleyes. Any tips for how to catch the eyes up there. Not exactly prime walleye season but we’ll give it a go.

yeah I do walleye guiding too. people think august is a tough, but it really isn’t just keep moving and be versitile. you can slip bobber for them with leeches or minnows in the weeds. Also jigging the sunken bogs. look on your locator where there is a bunch of timber and stumps on the bottom and jig it, usually good for numbers of fish but not big fish, along with jigging the river channel is the same. the bigger fish are usually shallower. I also like to fish the humps that top out just deep enough to where they don’t have weeds on them, they are good for some nicer fish either with crank baits or slip bobbers. Hope this helps.
Feel free to contact me with any questions.

thanks,
Tanner Wildes

Tanner

What have you been seeing for water temps on the Chip. We go up to the Chip every spring for Crappies and I am thinking we may need to move our trip up a week or two with the water warming so early.

Thanks Tanner

water temps are already in low to mid 50’s the crappies are already in the shallows, but remember fishing for everything including panfish out there opens with the general opener!

Good luck,
Tanner wildes

Tanner thanks for the update.

Do you see much temp variation from the west side to east side during the spring warm up?

not really that much, the east side is darker water but really there isn’t much difference.

Tanner Wildes

Thanks Tanner. I would of expected a bigger difference, since like you stated the west side is mostly darker bottom.