Big Stone, SD Walleye Report 5-19-06

I was again able to spend better than a week fishing Big Stone. I look forward every year to making the trip out to chase walleyes as you can catch them so many different ways. I was truly amazed this year as we had the same STRONG wind out of the NNW for 8 days. This made it easier to pattern a bite. The final day of the tourny the winds died and the lake went flat, and so did some peoples fish.

During our prefish we had fish going trolling plugs and spinners. There is a huge number of fish in the lake between 13-15" and this was we were catching with a 17-19" coming every 4th fish. We also managed fish up to 25" on slip bobbers. For whatever reason we were not able to get a good shallow water bite going. We figured it was due to the drop in water temps prior to our arrival.

Day 1 of the tourny we managed to only catch 5 small keepers trolling cranks. In this event you could weigh 6 fish, have 8 in the boat, and have 2 over 20" and no culling. Fortunatly we didn’t throw back our 14" fish hoping for bigger ones as others did. We were middle of the pack, but had the best weight we could for the day. On day 2 we knew we needed good weight to make the top 11 cut. We started shallow going big but only managed 2 14" fish. We then went to our trooling spot and right away picked up a 19.5 and 18" fish pulling spinners. This school was moving a lot, and staying on top of it was tough, but my partner Mike did a great job and we caught 2 more smaller fish to fill the limit. Knowing we needed more weight we ran to a spot known for bigger fish and manged to hook a 23" fish again pulling spinners with 15 minutes to spare. We weghed just under 12lbs and made the cut in 7th place. Day 3 was much like day 1. We couldn’t get the spinner bite, but did managed to catch a small limit to finish in 6th.

Congrats to the top teams. The Western Walleye tournaments are great events. Tues they had a kids event at the Matador and the kids got free goodies and a meal. I also wanted to add this was the first test for the new Skeeter and the 250 4-storke Yammi and it ran like a dream. I could run close to 50mph the whole week in the waves and when she died down I saw 63 top speed. Fuel consuption was 10-15 gallons per day doing quite a bit of running.