Mississippi River Pool 4 Walleye Report 3-27-05

It’s good to be back on the river a couple times a week and have mother nature cooperating for a change:). My past 3 trips on the river have seen some minor changes in the presentation that I have been using to put walleyes in the boat on a consistent basis. Up until around 4 days ago dragging ringworms up or down river was the key to covering water and putting fish in the boat. Now that the river has started to fill it’s banks those eye’s are falling in to the classic current break situations that a river angler has to encounter on a daily basis. Yes, we finally have some current to deal with!! This is a jig casters prime river situation .

With the warmer weather the water clarity is on the down fall at a dramatic rate of speed. All of the tributary streams/rivers on the upper end of the pool are spilling chocolate water in to the system. This has not seemed to effect the bite that drastically. James and I have still been able to pull some nice eye’s out of the dirtier water with some color adjustments on our baits. In the dirtier water the chartreuse colors have prevailed. There are areas that still have good clean water. Firecracker, fire an ice, pro-blue and oyster shell ringworms have done the trick for my boat in the above mentioned water clarities.

Sunday saw the a big change for me on what to look for versus my previous trip last Wednesday.

With the water flows good right now, most of our fish on Sunday came out of 8’ to 15’ of water vs. the real shallow stuff. Reason being? Depending on the area you are targeting the current seams are located at different depths. Concentrating on the seams, no matter what depth they appeared to be along the shoreline stretch we were fishing was the key to get bit. I did not boat a lot of fish in the dead slack water areas like we were seeing in weeks past. I believe with the increase in water flow those fish are constantly on the move harboring in to those little current breaks along the channels edge right now. They stop, rest and feed in an ideal location, then get back on the move to do the one thing they are programmed to do this time of year.

Sunday I spent the day with Darwin Viker. I have fished Darwin a couple of times now and putting fish in the boat has not been a problem for us when we hook up. Only problem we have had is not being able to boat a couple of those bigger walleye. This day just so happened to be our day to make up for the trips with out the big bite. The day was spent looking for that one big bite. Low and behold, we were fortunate enough to have 4 big eyes take a swipe at our plastics offering. Our 4 best fish started with a 7.3lb eye up to the biggest of the trip, that Darwin is pictured above with, going just short of 9lbs. Nice catch Darwin

Patterning a specific color was not easy for us to achieve on this day. Three colors did their damage on the bigger fish. We had 2 big fish on a pro-blue ringworm, one on a fire an ice ringworm and one of these mamas was fooled in to taking a firecracker 5”k-grub. 1/8oz black precision heads did the trick. We took fish on both sand and rock this day . Two of our better fish came on rock, and two came off of sand. Like I mentioned above, the depth was not as important as the location of the current seam. The 7:30 to 1:00 time frame was good for us, after 1:00 the bite was slow going for us.

Spring is here and the fish are bitin!

See ya on the river!