Mississippi River Pools 9 and 10 Report 8/21/04

I have been absent from the fishing reports lately but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been fishing. With the fall like temps and the low flow levels on the Mighty Mississippi, one really thinks that it is more like late September than mid to late August.

Fishing techniques have ranged from long line trolling, Dubuque rigging, casting cranks on wing dams and pitching jigs with live bait and plastics and although the fish have been slow on the numbers game, there have been some good quality fish being caught like this 19 inch smallie that Shed10 caught while dubuque rigging on a wing dam.

Walleyes and sauger have been mostly on the wing dams and rip rap or gravel shorelines for me while out on the Mississippi. I have been playing around alot with this method of fishing called dubuque rigging…

I have caught most of my bigger fish on the heavy jig at the bottom of my 3-way swivel. Rigging the jig with either a BFT Ringworm or one of their K-grubs has worked the best for me. On the line back off the 3-way you can either run a floating jig or plain hook tipped with live bait or run a floating rapala or some other type of floating crank bait. Just drop your offering to the bottom running parallel to the wing dam.

On our pool, pool 10, we have a good year class of walleyes all running in the 17-19 inch range, soon to all be in the 20-25 inch class…Were in for some real good years coming up. Selective harvest will allow all of us to share in some great fishing memories thats for sure…Here is a shot of the year class I’m talking about that is so plentiful in our pool right now.

On another trip I headed up to pool 9 for the day. In the morning it rained and rained, and rained…..the cooler temps were still in place so I started out pulling the dubuque rig again and also pitched 3/16 oz. H20 jigs tipped with a crawler or a leech…the fish came on both but when the wind kicked up I turned to trolling and then back to pitching jigs when the mind died down…The walleyes would pick up the bait and swim away with it. They wouldn’t smack it so you really had to feed them line once they picked it up…Lots of bait stealers too. I think I went thru about 6 dozen crawlers on this day…I had a very good friend out in the boat in the morning. This person was in the area and agreed to meet up for a half day on pool 9. I talked him into a picture but after it was taken this person asked me not to put his face on the web so I won’t. But with a little makeup we both get what we wanted…Here are a couple of walleyes that made it to our boat this morning I believe they all came on jigs and live bait but I do remember one or two coming on the dubuque rig too.

In the afternoon I met up with Tom Clearman and his wife. The clouds cleared up some but the rain just wouldn’t go away. But that didn’t stop us from heading out for the afternoon. The walleyes were very far and few between in the afternoon with just one or 20 inches caught…

But the sheepies are always willing to show up for some good pulling rod action…It was great fishing with all of you this past week and I can’t wait to do it again…I hope I was able to share some techniques that you will be able to use that will allow you to catch more walleyes in the future. I’ll leave you with a shot of one of the sheepies that was caught.