What a difference a day makes! The Fall frenzy is finally here, the water temps have hit the mid 40‘s and the fish are letting us know they are gorging themselves for the winter months
. The last 2 trips I have made to the big river have been nothing short of fantastic as far as walleye fishing standards go. Right now I have 2 main patterns going to put fish in the boat on bright sunny days. Anchoring up and concentrating on some of the deeper current breaks and eddies along the rivers edge I have been able to pull fish casting 3-ways rigs with minnows, or vertical jig in the 15‘-22’ depths with plastics, hair, blade baits or just plain bait. Just depends on what the fish want that particular day.
On Wednesday of this week, I shared my boat with Ken (Rivereyes) Christensen and his 2 good fishing buddies Jeff and Mark. I was really excited about this particular outing for one reason……..the forecast called for cloudy skies! The previous trips I had made to the river I was faced with those bright sunny blue bird days:(. Casting jigs to the rocks and working them back to the boat was not the most productive method for numbers of walleye by any means. The last cloudy day I had while on the river was 21 days ago. That’s the day we boated good numbers of fish over 20” and had a sumo walleye just short of the 10lb mark.
Well, with the cloudy skies this day was no different for Ken, Jeff, Mark and myself. It seemed as if we couldn’t go wrong 
. We started our day casting plastics to rip rap, about an hour and a half in to the game we had 9 nice walleye in the boat with the first walleye pictured here that hit the scale at 8 ½lbs. Ken caught this fish about 7:40 am to jump start our day in about 12’ of water casting a 5” chartreuse pepper K-grub on a 3/16oz plain lead head Precision Jig. Nice fish Ken 
. The bite in the area we were targeting slowly dwindled to white bass and those dreaded sheep heads 
:. After a change in location we picked up right were we left off at the last spot. By this time we had already dialed in the preference of bait for that particular time of the day. The fish were showing a strong preference for the 5”k-grubs over ring worms, hair jigs, blade baits or just plain minnows. Once we established a pattern I fumbled around with some of the above mentioned presentations, only to find out I was missing out on some good fish catching action 
.
Jeff is pictured here next with a couple of 22”-23” fish that he brought to the boat mid morning on 5“ K-grubs
. Nice eye’s Jeff! Right around 1:00 the winds picked up, the air temps dropped dramatically and the fish started to show a huge preference for the less aggressive baits. Ring worms were best hands down once this weather change was upon us. I have some of the new paddle tails from B-fishin’ Tackle that the 4 of us messed around with as well in the after noon with some positive results.
In the late morning hours, to the time we called it a day around 3:30, Mark had the hot hand for the better than average size eye’s. Mark is shown in the next 3 pictures with 3 of his best fish on this day. Nice fish Jeff! Our total fish count by trips end was 55 legal fish with 7 walleye surpassing the 23"mark and only 12 sauger making a showing 
Even with the cloudy skies, the walleye never became extremely active in the shallower depths. Most of our fish on this day came out of 10’ to 15’ of water. 1/4oz to 5/16oz jigs, once the winds picked up, were key to getting the right drift speeds out of our jigs. The chartreuse colors prevailed on this day with the purples taking second fiddle. I have yet to see a good dusk or dawn bite with the murkier water, a bulk of the action has been centered around 9:00 to 2:00 for my boat.
All in all it was a great day to be on the River. Good company, and some great fishing to kick off the fall frenzy on pool 4.Get out and get fishin
!
James was on the water today, maybe he’ll pop in and let us know how the bite held up today……..
?
Wishin for cloudy skies the rest of this month
! Until next time, I’ll see ya on the river 
Pictures may be clicked on for larger view!
Here’s Mark with his best walleye of the day caught on a purple/white tail ringworm
This is another shot of Ken’s big eye
Great fish you guys.
Sounds like a super day!!
Way to go guys
Today was an awesome way to follow up Dustin’s report although we did have to make an adjustment after 9 AM to stay on fish with the bright, cloudless conditions. The shallow bite was good for us right away although the fish really didn’t kick in until the sun was up a ways. Often we see a good bite right at sunrise but perhaps the lower than normal water clarity is causing the fish to wait for a little more light to work with. The rest of the fishermen waited for the sun to get well above the trees as we didn’t see another angler until after 8 AM!
K-grubs and chart. pepper ringies took most all of our fish in the first hour or so but most anything with a splash or dash of chartreuse got eaten. I fished with “BigPike” here from the website along with his nephew Eric and friend Barrett (sp?) from Eau Claire, WI. BigPike stuck a dandy 24″ for our big fish of the AM on a 5″ chartreuse pearl k-grub and we had a couple more over 20″s before the bright sunlight put the shallow bite in a funk.
Instead of continuing on in our search for shallow fish which is often futile during calm / bright conditions we opted to vertical jig a large current seam right below the dam and we got into one of the better vertical jig bites I’ve been in on in quite some time. Depths ranged from 15′ – 19′ deep and we had nearly constant action on 4″ chart. pepper ringies and the catalpa / chartruese Paddletail with the paddletail producing better numbers and our largest mid-day fish which was a 23″ walleye with a BUNCH of 19″ – 21″ fish in the mix. For over 3.5 hours we enjoyed fish after fish after fish action and the fish were pounding baits which really gets my blood pumping.
This was the first time I’d really been able to test drive the new Paddletails from BFT and they worked better than I anticipated. I only tried two colors on the day; purple pearl tail and catalpa orange chartruese tail. The catalpa orange jobbie got the nod this time out. 
Around 3:30 PM we turned back to the shallow bite and it started slowly but steadily improved and by the time the sun was getting low the bite was NUTZ. 2 fish on at a time. 3 fish. Most were solid fish in the 18″ – 22″ range and it’s pretty rare to see fish feed this aggressively for as long as we had them going.
I was a little hesitent to consider Dustin’s outing yesterday anything more than an “isolated” instance of darn good fishing without being able to put a couple excellent days in a row under different conditions.
We’ve had a couple false starts on the fall shallow water / plastic bite but this is not the case here. The bite is “on” and should run for the rest of the month and on into December.
Enjoy guys! I know I’ll be out early and often.
“I was really excited about this particular outing for one reason only……….the forecast called for cloudy skies! ”
ooooooh… Your gonna pay for that one!!
course on the other hand… I guess you did… sorry bout that fishing rod…. but spare the rod and spoil the Fishin…..
anyway… it was GREAT time…. Ive never got into the ‘eyes with that kind of consistancy… particularly for such a nice average.. it got so if you pulled in an 18″ fish you were thinking… man.. what a dinker…. that dont happen (to me) very often…..
well.. the photo ops were not all that good, what with the clouds and all… makes it hard to photo sunrise/sunset and wildlife… but I shot this guy… if you see a boat surrounded by a cloud of gulls its probably Dustin… they really like him for some reason…. (must be something fishy there!)… so anyway… I took a momment to shoot at a few of them with my Canon…. and I got one……
Rivereyes-
It is my new desktop background, and this pic is not the first of yours I’ve used as background.
Thanks for the picture.
I can just imagine the FUN!
The Walleye wasn’t bad either. 
Kenny great seagull CPR!!!
I’ll be there again soon…save a bigun for me!
I have to agree with the fishing reports!! I was out also and used live bait 3way rigging and had some of the best fishing of the year if not the best for me. One after another. The area below the vermillion was on fire and there wasnt another boat within eye sight. I had 6 fish over 25″. I did try ring worming through there but only had one fish on. I also tried floaters thru there on three ways and couldn’t get a hit. Just plain hook, but if thats what they wanted it was fine by me. I had 48% water temp when the best part of the bite was going on . I didn’t have any crawlers to try, would have liked to.
Sounds like you had a great day as well Destry
. Do you have a white Evinrude on your boat now? Guess I always thought you had Mercs 
. Didn’t know you were out and about or I would have swung by and talked for a bit 
NO, My boat sold, so I’m just using a loaner for the rest of the year. Saw you buzzing around looked like you had a pretty full boat. How did you do up by the dam on wisc. side? Looked like you parked there for a while in the later part of the afternoon.
Sounds great James and Dustin. James did you pick up any fish at the spots we hit last Friday. I am going to fish Sat or Sun. I’ll be in a white Lund pro v with Yamahas. I’m assuming it will be packed by the dam this weekend. Was the current seam you were fishing right up where all the boats are?
Destry, that must have been you in the tiller Alumicraft pulling 3-ways? You were undercover for the day
. When the winds picked up we anchored on the Wi side just to keep the boat under control. Got a few fish up there casting around but the action slowed quite a bit from what it was proir to the winds 
Yep that was me, When the wind picked up was when the 3 way’n picked up. probably see ya down there saturday.
Great report and pic’s Dustin. With these cooler temps the ringworm bite has started here on the Rock River. That’s the greatest feeling when a walleye hits a jig and ringworm this time of year.
Great report Dustin and James,
will get down soon, sounds like the bite is going very well. see you on the water.
Great Walleye, Ken. awesome.. am sure it is hard to catch fish with a camera in your hand.
Jack..
Just thought I would post a quick update of Sundays bite from my boat. I fished with Fred Bartling and his 15year old son Ian. Spent the day casting plastics, the bite was slower than my last outing on Wednesday but that’s to be expected with the higher boat traffic we see on the weekends. Oyster shell and firecracker ringworms did the trick for us today taking almost all of our better walleye.
The early morning bite was not great for us concentrating on rock so we took a quick look at some areas that had a mix of sand and clams. Just happened it paid off for us! The biggest change I saw form the bite on my last outing was the fish on the rocks were not as active as they were on my last trip to the river. Fred is pictured here with his best fish for the day
. After some minor adjustments in jig size, we were able to stay on a fair walleye bite for quite sometime 
. 10′ to 13′ of water was the most productive depths for us.
It was good to see a bunch of familiar faces on the river this weekend
Here’s Ian with his best fish for the day
. Ian had another fish up to the boat in the same size range as his dads fish pictured above…….. but someone was a little slow at getting the net 
…….. 
.
Fred has done a wonderfull job at teaching Ian to fish, he really nows how to handle a rod. He boated most of our fish on this day out doing the 2 old pro’s
Dustin, the clam and sand thing has my interest peaked! Was this on a shoreline break or on a flat?
John, we were concentrating on a small sand flat that had one high spot deposited with clams. This area was not very big but has a lot of deep water, 20′ plus surrounding it.
The area I was targeting was on the inside bend of the river so it had less flow. Hope that helps answer your question.
That definetly helps Dustin! I have a couple similar spots in mind here, have not hit this time of year, but I certainly will!
Just another quick update from todays walleye bite. I spent most of the day with Jeff Cox and Perry Bauer. Found all of our eyes on rip rap today with about 90% of our catch in 8′ of water or less with a lot of fish caught in under 3’of water. K-grubs in the chartreuse colors on 3/16oz precision heads were our best bait early on, as the day progressed the bite changed to ring worms in the oyster shell and firecracker colors. Perry is pictured here with his best fish of the day caught on a 5″ K-grub. This fish was just off the bank and a good way to start our day
. Nice catch Perry 
!
Here is Jeff Cox with another shallow water walleye caught on the same set up as Perry’s fish above
The am bite was the best today but about 2:00 in the afternoon Perry strikes again with another big eye! This time a 1/8oz precision head with a firecracker ringworm did the trick.
Looks like your on some good fish Dustin
How did you do today?
Hi Brian
.
Fishing was good from 7:00am to 11:00am. I Fished with Todd Olson today, we got bit in every spot we pitched except for two. After 11:00am the bite slowed for us. We were off the water at around 1:30. K-grubs and paddle tails took all our fish today……..never caught a legal walleye on a ringworm today
. Todd is pictured here with his 2 best eye’s of the outing 