Lake Bemidji walleye

Hey everyone,

I’ve been figuring out my new humminbird/minn kota setup on Lake Bemidji and just haven’t been able to develop a consistent pattern for walleye. I was able to mark shallow fish early in spring (even if they weren’t biting). Now that water temps are warming and the weeds are growing I’m finding side imaging to be a bit more useless.

We had one really good night a few weeks back in about 4-6 feet where we caught a bunch of nice eaters (Marked, spot locked upwind, cast jigs back), but since then haven’t been able to get on a good bite other than some nice sized northerns and occasional perch (partially due to weather). Does anyone have some tips to help find and catch with a bit more consistency around this area? Is Bemidji really this tough of a walleye bite? I think I’ve watched nearly every Tom Boley video, and of course anything IDO or angling edge. Thanks in advance!

Side imaging is definitely not useless. Tom Boley videos are great, but if you watch all of them you’ll believe you should always be casting jigs back to a pod of fish. What I do when I can’t find any schools of walleye is troll, sometimes they’re just spread out. If your new to side imaging like I am, spend a day trolling crank baits and playing with your settings and just watching the screen. It helped me anyways.

As for Bemedji, I’m no help

Bob Erfish wrote:

Side imaging is definitely not useless. Tom Boley videos are great, but if you watch all of them you’ll believe you should always be casting jigs back to a pod of fish. What I do when I can’t find any schools of <strong class=”ido-tag-strong”>walleye is troll, sometimes they’re just spread out. If your new to side imaging like I am, spend a day trolling crank baits and playing with your settings and just watching the screen. It helped me anyways.

As for Bemedji, I’m no help

Yeah I absolutely love side imaging for finding the structure, but I guess what I’m saying is I’m not able to readily find fish on the outside or inside edge of a weedline. I’ll have to try trolling more, I just hate the weeds that comes along with it haha

I primary use my side image to find structure, you being new to this there is a learning curve but you’ll get it, just don’t be afraid to push buttons., there another youtube video I would recommend I think it’s called Walleye by temperature.

If your not able to find fish on the weed lines, maybe they just aren’t there? Trust your electronics, it’s the time of year when a lot of fish move out to deeper structure, reefs, deep mud flats, etc.

Love those TB videos. He has one where he uses SI to find crappies hugging bottom on a mud flat- so you see these little specks of value change on a mid tone background. So how do you know those are fish? could be rock on mud or sand, wood on mud. He had been there the day B4 and they were active and up high, next day cold front. So if you are like me and you change lakes a lot it is hard, you need some context or other info to figure out those little specs you are seeing.

tim hurley wrote:

Love those TB videos. He has one where he uses SI to find crappies hugging bottom on a mud flat- so you see these little specks of value change on a mid tone background. So how do you know those are fish? could be rock on mud or sand, wood on mud. He had been there the day B4 and they were active and up high, next day cold front. So if you are like me and you change lakes a lot it is hard, you need some context or other info to figure out those little specs you are seeing.

It’s really incredible to watch how easily he puts them in the boat. Granted it is his job and he says he fishes 7 days a week. Thankfully I’m just fishing on Bemidji, so no frequent scenery change for me. I’d like to get good enough that I could drop the boat on a new lake and pick it apart in a day, but that doesn’t seem like an easy feat to do well at this point.

Water temp as of this morning was still very low to mid 60s. So I guess maybe next weekend I’ll have to start checking off shore structure, I did mark some fish on the first ledge, but nothing biting.

I vacationed on Bemidji this weekend but did not fish the lake (too windy). We did well on off shore structure on smaller sheltered lakes. When weather cooperated there was a line of boats from Diamond Point across to the Miss outlet side. The big divider if you look at a map. Not unusual for this time of year if that helps. I am not a crowd guy.

PM me if you want more info. But yes, many walleye lakes are different and Lake Bemidji is not an easy nut to crack.

The fish on lake Bemidji barely ever leave the weeds anymore. Some spots like diamond bar and reese’s point don’t have much for weeds. The fish that use those spots are typically just hanging around on the break-lines between 8-20′.

This time of year there are always a lot of fish in the fresh cabbage that’s growing. Fish that are in thick cabbage patches can be difficult to see on side imaging.