Fishflies and Walleyes!!!

We had a pretty good fishfly hatch here on pool 12 this past weekend. I talked to a couple pan fishermen who weren’t doing so well and from what I hear the catfish bite was also pretty dead but the walleye bite was fantastic. I did very well both Saturday and Sunday mornings. I finally found a wingdam with lots of 15″ to 18″ walleyes stacked on it. There were a few fish over 20″ and a couple under 15″ but they wre mostly legal keepers. On Saturday I netted my biggest walleye of the year to date at 26-1/2″ as well as a couple just under 22″. Sunday I caught only one fish over 20″ and that was a nice 24″ fatty. The rest were all nice eaters of which I kept a limit of. I haven’t kept fish for a while and was hungry for some fresh walleye and boy was it good. Limits of good eater size fish have been difficult to come by this year on pool 12 mainly due to the good numbers of fish in the protected 20″ to 27″ slot. Finding so many “legals” stacked in one area was a treat. Most of the fish were taken pulling a jointed Shadrap parallel to the face/top of the wingdam. I pulled with my electric to keep the noise down. I did manage to get a couple fish to take a crawler on a 3-way DBQ rig including the 26-1/2″ fish I caught on Saturday. Sunday morning I fished from 8am to 10:15am and caught 6 legal walleyes, one 24″ walleye, 2 short (14″) walleyes and one smallie. The trees near the end of this particular wingdam were coated with fishflies and there were shad and other forage fish feeding heavily on the fishflies. I would have to guess that the walleyes were there to join the feast a little higher up the food chain.

When I pull cranks on wingdams I pull parallel to the face of the dam. My distance from the dam all depends on the current, the average depth of water in front of the dam and the speed at which I troll. This weekend I wasn’t fishing a wingdam with much current and there probably isn’t more than maybe 8 feet of water in front of this dam. Because of this I was keeping my boat probably less than 15 feet from the front of the dam which is one of the reasons I used my electric to troll.

Down in this stretch of the river we have some pretty long wingdams and pulling cranks on these is a no-brainer. I guess the longer wingdams is part of why I am such an advocate for trolling above wingdams rather than anchoring above wingdams. I would not catch half of the walleye I do on wingdams if I anchored and I’d more than likely catch a great deal more undesireable fish by anchoring. I’ve casted cranks on this particular dam and done well many times but for one reason or another I decided to pull on it instead of cast it. When I was getting a fish on almost every pass on the dam it made no sense for me to start casting.

Thanks for the report Eyehunter!

I did some cranking on dams this weekend and I agree with eyehunter, the long shallow dams are best, you can get a good long run in before you have to turn around, the dams I fished had slow flow so I just forward trolled out and back trolled in, keeping me on the face of the dam the whole time, if the current was stronger you wouldn’t be able to stay sideways to the dam. 3-4 passes back and forth and if you don’t get bit move on.