Missouri River South Dakota Walleye Report

What a difference a year makes! June 2012 brings fish stories that don’t include any talk of flooded parks, boat ramps, or neighbors’ homes. Instead, we get to focus on the better things in life, like taking a little time with family. Father’s Day was a perfect excuse to get both my father, Joe Kuehl and my father-in-law, Tim Zoucha on the water to chase a meal of walleye and catch up on some story-telling.

The setting for our adventure was the Missouri River reservoirs of South Dakota. With the crank bait bite in full swing on Lewis and Clark near Yankton, SD my father and I got a head start and decided to spend a few hours trolling the flats early last Sunday. It didn’t take us but a few hours to catch a few walleye for a fish fry. Walleyes ranged from 15 to 19 inches and seemed to favor shad style cranks trolled at 1.4 – 1.6 MPH on the GPS. If we went to fast, the bite stopped.

On Wednesday, we met up with Tim and headed to Francis Case near Platte, SD. Our destination was Dock 44 on Snake Creek (home of one of the better steak sandwiches you’ll ever eat, by the way). For those of you not familiar with the Missouri River system in South Dakota, Francis Case is the second reservoir from the south on the reservoir system. It’s a little over 100,000 acres of slow moving river at normal pool. Francis Case gets tagged with that often used term, “walleye factory”, and it certainly can be just that at times.

My preferred technique this time of year (read: with a couple of wobbly old farts in the boat) is pulling bottom bouncers with a plain #4 hook and half a crawler. I had never fished this particular part of the river for walleye, but it didn’t take us long to find what looked like a “good spot”. We found a rocky shoreline that slid into the water and dropped into about 20 FOW before shortly dropping to 60 feet. When the wind blew, the walleye bit. When the wind died, so did the bite. In the end, we battle the elements and beat Mother Nature at her own game, using the wind to our advantage as best as we could while keeping dry and afloat. That can be easier said than done in a 16-foot Explorer on a windy day, but we got ‘er done and had a ton of fun in the process. Perhaps most importantly, we were able to return home to our wives with dinner in tow like Neanderthals returning to the cave. And if God grants us all a little more time, we plan to do it all over again next year.

Here’s to my two dads and all the fathers out there on this Father’s Day. Have a safe and wonderful summer!