Lake of the Woods Walleyes (NW Angle)

It’s deemed the walleye capital of the world for a reason! If you enjoy stretching the string on what seems like an endless amounts of walleyes the Northwest Angle is for you.

I arrived Saturday afternoon, plopped the boat in and then headed to the south side of Oak Island on an submerged hump, and then to Tech with little to show for our efforts.

Next we jumped to Flag island and were instantly on fish. The sun was already setting and we continued to pound fish. We ended the night with a great batch of fish.

The next morning we headed to Starren Shoal on Garden Island. Our plan was to pull leadcore around and attempt to find heavy concentrations of fish we could then jig.

I was fishing with my dad and good friend Tom, who had no previous leadcore experience. I ran the boat while they tended lines. It did seem to take them long as minutes in Tom hooked up with what appeared to be a stud, but just before he became visible the hooks popped.

The lost opportunity was washed away as we quickly boated another mid twenties walleye. Over the radio crackled from our partner boat as they stood up smiling with a dandy 27″ eye. It was their inaugural trip pulling leadcore but it didn’t hold them back!
We continued to beat up on fish trolling before we doubled on two nice fish and decided to jig. Again we destroyed the walleyes! A truly fantastic day on the water!

Leadcore Tactics – We found most of our fish from 17-20 feet pulling Suffix 832 Advanced Leadcore, with 15 lb Fluoro and the Scatter Rap was the hot bait. It seemed Gold Alburnus minnow was the best bait, but the Scatter Crank in Demon and a #7 Shad Rap in Bleeding Copper Flash also caught fish.

I wouldn’t go up to LOTW trolling without that Gold Alburnus Scatter Rap Minnow, I swear it was built for this lake!

We trolled at 1.8-2.2, which appeared to be the preferred speed. Anytime we went over a gradual rise in the reef, I would slow down and allow the lines to dig into the bottom and speed up lifting the baits over the slow rise, and it produced on a number of occasions.

The size of the fish trolling leadcore versus jigging was pretty stark. While you would sort through fish after fish jigging, the average fish on Leadcore was around 20″ and jigging was maybe around 14″. Jigging yielded a higher number of fish but you would have to sort quite a bit.