Fished the Wapsi again Saturday before the IA game and it is still on fire. I thought the strong storms rolling through the area Friday would have subdued the bite but it didn’t seem that was the case. The storms were so severe in fact that I had to stay at work until 8pm Friday night to bring my Iowa City center back up. We received a direct lightning strike at 4pm and fried some UPS components. Couldn’t even put the darn thing in bypass without vendor engineer assistance. Anyway back to fishing, even with the crazy storm Friday night the fish were still cooperative Saturday morning. I started out throwing twisters and laying a slop pole with a crawler on the bottom. The white bass were really active and I caught 10 of them to any other species 1 count. Not what I was after but they sure kept you busy and some were pushing 2 lbs. Finally hooked up with a nice 16 inch walleye which went on the stringer for dinner. After another 7-8 whitebass I noticed something chasing minnows out of the water downstream from me. The water looked shallow so I threw on a shallow shadrap, 1 cast later I was rewarded with a plump and surprisingly spunky 20 inch walleye. After catching 5 or 6 more whitebass and then a really nice Smallie one more 16 inch walleye attacked the shallow shadrap. The lessons I took from this day was to stay very aware of your surroundings and not to overlook shallow water for Walleye. The area these fish came out of was from 1-4 feet deep with the majority of the water being 2 feet deep and occasional ridges up to 1 foot and occasional depressions of 4 feet. My guess is that the game fish were herding the bait in the pools and using the ridges to trap them. Certainly not enough evidence to be scientifically valid but 1 walleye out of the deeper water, 2 out of the shallow water will make me target the shallow water more often than I do now. Additionally the larger whitebass and larger smallmouth were also shallow. The slop pole and crawler got no results at all…
October 25, 2004 at 7:13 pm
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