Lake Wisconsin Post Spawn Walleye Fishing

Lower water levels and improving water temps did a lot to improve the walleye & sauger bite this past weekend on Lake Wisconsin. Many of the fish appeared to have spawned right around the 3rd week of April and they are just now starting show up in good, fishable numbers here in Lake Wisconsin.
Many (if not most) tend to run up river and spawn within 5 or 10 miles of the Wisconsin Dells dam. So each year, many of us, look forward to this time when we see large numbers of fish starting to show up at the mouth of the Wisconsin River and head of the lake.

Water temps on the lake this past weekend ran anywhere from the mid 50’s to the low 60’s depending on where you were.
As for depths and techniques, lots of options to choose from this time of the year.
Lets look at depths first:
About the only depth we didn’t catch a fish at this past weekend was in deep water. On Lake Wisconsin, that means water deeper than 18 feet. Part of that may very well be that we didn’t spend a lot of time there. We did spend a little time trolling that zone but never had a bite.
Jigging & trolling both worked in depths between 10-16′ of water.
We also caught several walleye & sauger in very shallow water while looking for crappies in the bays on 1/16oz jig/plastic/waxworm setups. We caught fish both right below the boat and up shallow on these rigs and they weren’t all shorties. A couple of them were keepers.

Pulling crank baits behind lead core was probably our best overall technique. Especially on Saturday. By Sunday though, many of the nicer fish we had found appeared to either have lock jaw or they moved on to another location which is very common at this time as many of these fish are just passing thru the upper stretches of the lake as they make there way to summer haunts.
That’s also partly why I like trolling so much at this time of the year. Its a great way to cover water and locate fish.
Once found, you can always slow down a bit and try some other techniques in an effort to find what works best on any given day.

Jigging was the other technique we used with success this weekend. Jigs tipped with minnows, jigs tipped with crawlers and jig & plastics all worked at times.
We vertical jigged when fishing 10-17′ of water and chose to drag jigs when fishing in less than 10′ of water and at times, caught fish doing both.
At other times though, the bite was pretty tough regardless of whether we were vertical jigging, dragging or even trolling for that matter.
No doubt lots of things work this time of year. But having said that, you may also have to do a little searching to find active fish. The good news is, it usually only gets better from here on through about the 4th of July.
That’s about 1-1/2 months of great fishing we have to look forward to.
Certainly something to look forward to after the winter and spring we just experienced!