According to Kevin Stauffer in the walleye portion of his seminar a couple weeks ago…the best hatch of walleyes on record came from the spring of 2009. Although he cautioned that was from the first sampling and this will be confirmed this spring.
The best conditions he said were high sustained levels like we had last spring. It takes about 3 years for them to grow to catchable size, he said. So the year of 2012 should be a record for catchable walleyes on P4.
Not that this answers your question.
In general when the water comes up and stays… so that eggs don’t end up on stranded on dry land we have a good spawn… 2001… and the fish especially walleye actually all most always move towards the dam and and then towards the shoreline or behind obstructions as water levels rise.
The biggest thing that seems to be important regarding making for a hard bite is the amount of irritation that the flood water can cause… some floods seem to all grit in the water and some just seem to be milky… but the walleye definitely do not bite well after getting hundreds of gallons of the gritty stuff through their gills.
As a general statement I can not remember the time that high water in spring did not increase my success… mostly because of it’s tending to concentrate large numbers of fish and forage. But often I had to run in search of the areas where the water was cleanest, and that makes little bays and backwater lakes such a blast in high flood water.
You must be logged in to reply to this topic.
