Went up north to a Hayward area lake for WI fishing opener last weekend and experienced the best walleye fishing I’ve ever had. Have a cabin on the lake and used to have entire summers were I’d be thrilled to just catch a couple fish. Finally starting to expect to catch maybe 8-10 on the right evening, but have never seen anything like this. We pulled 120-130 walleyes in just under two days. All fish came off the same flat just off of shoreline. There were a good 8-10 other boats on the lake at all times throughout the weekend with a couple of the boats stopping by to fish near us, but they’d only fish the spot for about an hour before they’d high tail it out of there headed somewhere else. Saw a net out here and there but not too frequently from the others. Seemed like everyone else was spot locked and tossing lindys/jigs while we trolled shallow diving cranks and absolutely laid the lumber down on these fish.
Just about every single time one of us had a fish hooked, a small school of similar sized walleyes were swimming with him right to the side of the boat, especially after dark. Most of the time it was only one or two, but there were a few times up to 8 or 9 walleyes were right up next to the boat following the walleye we had hooked. Could have netted all of them with the right size net (which I assume wouldn’t be legal?) Every single walleye we caught was a male and they were almost all actively spawning. Has anyone else ever experienced this? Is this normal activity? It was absolute insanity. Only something I thought could come out of a fairy tale!
