Lake Wisconsin Fall Walleye & Sauger Fishing

The fall walleye & sauger fishing bite we experienced this past weekend on Lake Wisconsin was an excellent reminder as to why dedicated walleye anglers keep coming back for more. Cool temps, moderate winds, leaves almost gone from the trees and fish that have finally decided to put on the feed bags!
This is the time of the year where outdoor sportsmen & women have to decide whether or not they want to go out hunting or head out to the lake or river for one last shot at some good walleyes & saugers.

(The first bite of the morning came fast and it turned out to be our biggest sauger of the Fall so far. Congrats to Cliff Watson who caught his new personal best sauger on a 3/8oz orange/chartreuse H20 Precision jig tipped with a large minnow)

For sure, Fall is my favorite time of the year. The only bad part about the Fall season is how fast it seems to go.
This year, the walleye/sauger fishing wasn’t bad but it definitely seemed like it wasn’t quite going full gear yet with all the small fish showing up. Or maybe it was the lack of fish over 20″ that were not showing up. Either way, with the cooler temps dropping lake water temps down into the low 40 degree range, that all changed in a hurry this past weekend.

(Mike Concannon didn’t wait long to connect with another good fish on Saturday morning. Seemed like only a few minutes went by and I was slipping the net under this nice 23″ walleye that also fell for the orange/chart H20 Precision jig tipped with a large minnow)

It seemed like the only thing I was doing for the first two hours Saturday morning was netting, measuring and either snapping pictures or boxing keepers for the guys. They were doing a pretty efficient job on the walleyes & saugers. I finally did get a chance to catch one myself a bit later in the morning. None of the fish we caught, other than Cliff’s 23″ sauger, would qualify as trophies. But several of them were big enough to put a pretty good smile on any walleye anglers face and after all the hard work I had put in trying to locate better than average size walleyes over the past couple of weeks, it sure felt good to see how much fun Mike & Cliff were having with these fish.

Sunday morning I didn’t have a trip booked but there was simply no way that I was going to stay home and sleep in. Even as tired as I was from fishing all day in the wind on Saturday, Sunday morning couldn’t come fast enough. I woke up before the alarm sounded off, loaded up and headed to the lake.
The walleyes were sitting right where we left them and they were even hungrier than the day before. At one point, I snapped a picture or two of a nice fish, released it, dropped my blade back in the water and by the time I picked it up, another picture quality fish had already engulfed my blade bait. It actually felt like I was wasting time taking pictures when I should have been fishing.
It was definitely one of those fall days that will go down in memory with the hopes of being repeated again someday down the road. One good day of fall fishing like this past weekend, can easily make up for several poor trips along the way.