The spawn is nearly finished up now with most all of the larger females coming to my boat looking a little light in the britches. We’re still seeing a couple 20 – 22 inch fish each day still carrying eggs but the larger girls seem to have done their thing and put on the feedbag so far this week with pretty impressive numbers of 24" – 28" fish being caught by our guide clients each day!
Some outstanding river fishing is still taking place on pool 4 although you will likely need to look away from the dam area for the best walleye bite. Saugers are still available in fairly decent numbers in the area immediately near the dam but for the most part the walleyes have dropped back. Fishing the last 3 days has been exceptional with 5 – 8 fish over 25" being the average although eaters have been few and far between for us where we’ve been fishing.
We got things started off right for Dean Marshall shown here in these first two photos by putting him on a slug of nice fish with the largest pair shown here coming just 2 casts a part. We have been targeting deep rip rap just off of the main channel current and fishing plastics, ringies mostly with a few fish coming on k-grubs and a couple fish caught casting crankbaits (our first of the year for 2005!).
With the water levels VERY high and the fish spawning up in the trees and backwaters nearby it seems that the females have been using these areas to hold during the day and we’ve been fairly successful in convincing a few to slurp up a ringworm. Oddly enough, even with these dirtier water we’re seeing firecracker to be one of our hottest patterns with purple chartreuse tail and blue black core doing well at times too.
The peak bite times have consistently been 7 AM – 9 AM and then again from 1 – 3 PM with short flurries of activity sprinkled in throughout the day. With water levels falling (more on water levels toward the end… you’ll NEVER believe what has happened on pool 4 today! 
) we’re needing to adjust locations every day with a noticable movement of fish downstream and away from the dam area. Each day we get a little further downstream to stay on the best fish so be prepared to cover some water to find the bite each day.
Matt Maring is shown in this 3rd photo with what will likely be our last large PRE-SPAWN female of 2005 unless we bumb into a straggler. Matt and I had an exceptional day on Monday…. Matt caught this 8 Lb eye as well as a pair of 26" fish. Way to go Matt!
More about water levels….
One of the CRAZIEST things happened today while fishing with Tom "BlueFleck" Donaldson. We were actually taking a photo of a walleye when we noticed a very distinct waterline begin to appear on the shore. Over the course of about 10 minutes it appeared that the river had dropped about a foot and it kept dropping! We really weren’t sure of what was going on but a quick look at the dam showed that 3 of 4 rollers had been closed down tight. And I mean TIGHT! Over the course of another 10 minutes or so the river had dropped another half foot or so and on our way into the resort we had to go past the Vermillion River inlet. For those of you familiar with the area, you know there is a fair amount of current coming in from this tributary at times and the force of the flow of water from this stream can sometimes push a fair distance out into the mississippi river. Well…. with the big river dropping rapidly the Vermillion picked up incredible force as the water from upstream gushed down into the mississippi river to fill the void. For a brief time the Vermillion was dumping so much volume of water that the flow from this normally tame river was over-powering the big river and impacting with force on the opposite shoreline! It was an incredible sight to behold and at this time we still had no idea what the heck was going on although we knew we really wanted to get the heck off the water and find out!
By the time we had the boats on trailers the river was filled with trees, stumps and other debris… it looked like the flood of 2001 all over again.
And then Steve Vick called me to ask if I wanted to hop in his boat and run up to the dam to see the barge that had rammed the dam and was partially sticking through the one remaining open gate…. !
Apparently 3 barge flats, still attached to the tow or recently re-attached by the time Steve spotted the mess, had hit the dam and forced the lock and dam crews to close the rollers in what I can only assume would be an attempt to make extraction a little easier.
I did not opt to go out and see this mess myself but Steve did promise to take some photos to share with all of us here. The one thing I do know is that water levels changed incredibly over the course of a few minutes so where ever you found walleyes today you can count on them NOT being there tomorrow!~
Hopefully I’ll be able to get some more info on this in the next day and share it here or if someone, anyone, knows what happened and what caused all the fuss they’ll share it here with us.
Some of the BEST walleye fishing is headed our way over the next 6 weeks so don’t turn your attention away from the river just yet!
Blue Fleck starts the morning off RIGHT!
The guide gets a 25″….
Followed up by a 27″. All fish were released in darn fine shape!
This photo will give everyone an idea of how FAST and FAR the water dropped.
Notice the dark waterline on the shore. We lost that amount of water in 15 – 20 minutes. Blue Fleck has lived on the banks of the river his whole life and had never seen ANYTHING liike this! I’m not sure any of us have.
Great report James, I would agree that the best fishing is still to come on rivers. Good to see you got a bass guy out walleye fishing
. Those are some nice looking walleyes. What’s up with the new look? 
James, How do you think this will effect Pepin? Or won’t it? as there is’nt much flow through there anyway. Will the fish find there summer haunts right away or will they stage up somewhere till this all straightens out?
I wonder…… If they’ll open the gates wide open again when the get the Barge out?
It would have been interesting to see a picture of that mess they had going on above the dam.
This may be a stupid question, but I’m going to ask anyway.
When the water is this high, and the Walleye, or anyother fish go into the trees to spawn, How does this affect the spawn? I mean when the water drops back into its banks, I’m guessing that there really won’t be a hatch. Is this a correct assumption?
Here’s a pretty cool graphic that shows the pool and tailwater elevations James is referring to: USACE water level graph
Top line is the pool elevation (water level above the dam) and the bottom line is the tailwater elevation (below the dam). I wonder when these lines will come back together!?!?
John
Fishinbuddy, I was just wondering the same thing…
Cool John, Thanks. Looks like they “locked”her down pretty tightly!
Great report James, am also glad to see your customers continue to get some competition from you. Way to go Dean on a very nice pair of fish.
Jack..
fishnbuddy… actually some of the best spawns come when the river is really high… they think it might have something to do with the fry staying out of the channel where barge traffic seems to cause high mortality… on the down side of this year Im afraid the water temps raised much more quickly than they should have… a quickly rising water temp often causes poor spawning success… however the number of spawned out fish is encouragin… so with a little luck this will be a bumper year….
They opened the dam full bore this morning…whole trees coming down the river today. The bite was non existant. I’m sure the fish need a little time to restabilize!
Rivereyes, I was thinking more along the lines of the water dropping out of the areas the fish spawn in…
That is more like what I was thinking also.
James,
I was hiking around the Vermillion bottoms earlier this week…albeit a few miles upstream of the confluence.I remember thinking to myself,”Boy,the river seems to really be moving fast”.Don’t know if there’s any correlation there or not but,kind of makes me wonder.
Here is one pic of the barge. They didn’t turn out very good, but you get the idea.