Larry Pakyz and I spent Sunday morning fishing in the Sauk Prairie Bow Hunters Walleye tournament.
Its a small tournament, held bi-weekly I believe, through out the summer.
After 5 days of cold and unsettled weather, the surface water temps of Lake Wisconsin dropped 6 to 7 degrees. Where as last week, we were starting to see surface water temps sneak into the low 60’s, this weekend, they were running in the low 50’s.
Cloudy, windy skies greeted us as we arrived at the boat landing around 6:30am. The air temperature was running in the low 40’s and the winds blew 15-20mph from the NW. Boat control was going to be fun today.
Usually when the middle of May rolls around, you don’t have to worry to much about what the wind chill is going to be. I had to break out the coveralls for this trip!
With all the unsettled weather over the past 5 days, we didn’t think the trolling bite would be to hot and opted to go with night crawlers and plastics instead.
The walleyes started a bit slow for us. At about 8am, we finally hooked and landed our first keeper, a nice 18" sauger.
We proceeded to land 6 more walleyes and saugers over the next few hours. All of our fish came from water depths of 16-19′ of water. Most were caught on night crawlers but our biggest came on a B fish N Tackle Ringworm. That one measured up at 20-1/16" long. Just a hair to big.
The morning went fast and we had to be back at the boat landing by 10:30am for the official weigh-in.
This tournament is won by the biggest legal walleye only. And since our biggest was in the slot, we didn’t win.
I don’t have permission to use the name of the angler who did win it with a very nice 19-15/16" walleye. Congratulations on a nice catch!
It does look like the walleye bite is shaping up pretty good though. Look for the walleye bite to keep getting better and better over the next couple of weeks on Lake Wisconsin.
Good luck out there!