Every year, I make sure to set aside vacation days for pre-spawn spring walleye fishing trips. The Mississippi at Red Wing has always demanded top billing for precious few vacation days. Lately though, I’m finding it much harder to continue giving top billing to Red Wing over the opportunities for numbers of big fish in the waters on & around the Menominee river in northeast Wisconsin where big walleyes make annual spawning runs from Green Bay.
This year I squeezed in a 4-day trip to northeast Wisconsin on pretty much the only days possible in my schedule. Even though it seemed a little to early due to mother nature insisting on making winter much longer than it needs to be, the fishing turned out to be pretty good.
We didn’t find large numbers of huge, hungry walleyes waiting for us but we did find adequate numbers. Certainly enough to make it well worth our while.
Vertical jigging with a plain jig & minnow always works well up here. So does casting jig & plastic combo’s into shallower waters. If the water temps are warm enough, 3-waying stick baits always seems to put big fish in the boat. Blade baits also account for a large number each year although with water temps at 35 degrees, they didn’t put many fish in the boat for us this year.
By far, our top two techniques this year was either casting jig/plastics or dragging jig/plastics. Vertical jigging with a plain jig & minnow also put fish in the boat for us.
Many people who have never fished here will find this hard to believe, but the average size walleye caught is right around 19-20″ long. The smallest walleye we caught on this trip was 17″ long.
Another oddity of this area is the size of the male walleyes. Although we did not catch one on this trip, catching a male walleye over 25″ long up here is not at all unusual.
One thing that really struck me as odd was the number of males we caught that were milting. Pretty much every single male walleye we caught was milting even though water temps were generally 35 degrees.
If your just looking to take home a bunch of fresh walleye fillets though, this is not the area for you as the daily bag limit on the Menominee river is 1 fish per day and the possession limit is double that.
But for fishermen who just enjoy pulling in plenty of nice size, hard fighting walleyes, this is a great destination.
More pics from our walleye fishing trip to northeast Wisconsin.
Nice fish and good info Boog! Looks like a great destination!
Remember the first time we met you down there Boog? It was fun doing the drift together…
I’ll be down there soon…thanks for the report!
Looks like a great way to spend those vacation days!
Nice report Joel. I need to try new waters in the future, and the Menominee and the Peshtigo are on my list.
For anyone interested in making a trip this year yet, by far our best plastics were a 4″ chartreuse pepper moxie on a purple/white precision jig and a 4″ electric blue ringworm on a orange/chart precision jig.
I realize that could change on a daily basis but it could be a good starting point for you.
Looks like a successful trip for sure!
awsome report, that runs on my list forsure, so many fish, so little time!
Thanks for the nice report. Sounds like a nice trip.
Nice fish Joel. Looks like the only thing missing was some warmer temps!