I had the opportunity to spend the afternoon on Wissota chasing eyes and smallies with John and Dave from Menominie. We didn’t exactly have the best weather to work with: stiff S/SE wind, good-sized rollers in the main lake, and oh yeah, a steady rain that lasted every bit of 3 hours. It was the kind of trip that would be very short if the fish weren’t biting.
Good thing they were! 
John, Dave and I started out trip in a sheltered corner of the Chippewa River on a spot that has been historically good this season when the river has some current. As we pulled up, we noted that we did indeed have some current to work with. While eyes were our main target, our first 6 fish were all smallies, including the toad that John is holding in the picture below. This was John’s second fish of the trip, and it was just a beast. Decent length at just under 18″, but look at that girth! If someone is missing a cookie sheet, I think this fish may have eaten it. This fish fell to a crawler half pitched on a 1/16 oz pink jig.
With no eyes to show for our efforts, we moved farther up the river to pitch jigs to a very reliable current seam and adjoining deep hole. After fine-tuning our jig weights and live bait offerings, we found a very nice pod of walleyes, both eaters and slot fish, relating to the current seam and nearby slack water. A key for us here was to upsize our jig from 1/16 to 1/8 to keep us in the strike zone in the swift flow. We flipped well over a dozen eyes into the boat from this location before the current went slack and the bite fizzled. If the Jim Falls dam would ever stay open for more than a couple hours at a time, that river bite would really be something special!
With an hour or so to go before John and Dave had to start home, we decided to pull some cranks on leadcore to give my guests some experience with a technique they had never used before. We had to bounce around a bit before we got back on the fish. Once fish started showing up on the locator in 20-22 fow along a windblown shore, rod tips started doing the fish dance and walleyes were once again headed to the net. And not just walleyes…a crappie and even a decent sized bluegill also found the livelwell. I’m quite certain that I had never seen a bluegill caught on a crank presented on leadcore before…and let me tell you…that side-to-side running that a gill does can sure wreak havoc on a spread of 4 leadcore lines. 
John, Dave and I had a lot of fun on our brief outing. In 5+ hours, we put somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 walleyes in the boat…mostly slot fish but we scraped up 5 eaters too. We also had 7 or 8 smallies, and of course a couple of wayward panfish. Thanks for braving the elements with me today guys, I hope we have a chance to fish together again soon….next time, out of a boat with a full windshield to keep us a bit drier!
Water temps on the lake are 64….61-62 way up the Chip. Fall is here, and the eyes are snapping. Take some time away from the deer stand and come dance with some Wissota walleyes!
