Mississippi River Pool 2 fishing report 5-7-07

The walleye bite on Pool 2 is showing its true fashion of becoming more and more predictable. The water temps are hovering around 60 degrees or so and river level stages have dropped dramatically in the past seven days or so. With the dropping water levels, the walleyes have been on the move a bit to seek more favorable grounds. It’s quite surprising how a spot can change look with the dropping water. Some areas that I have been fishing this past week, actually has more current on it now than it did a week ago.

Rivers are an ever changing environment and we anglers must be able to adapt in these conditions to prove productive.

Tom Wallrich and I recently spent a couple afternoon/evenings in hunt for some aggressive walleyes. With the water levels on the drop here recently, I had a plan in my mind on what areas we might need to check out compared to what I had going just two days prior. After arriving at our first spot, (a place where we got into some nice fish a couple days ago) I realized that the water dropped easily 8-10" and the current seam had no longer looked as appealing as it did a few days ago. After looking at the spot, we decided to try it out for a few casts and then move on if we had no results….Within about 20 minutes at the spot and no fish, I had a gut feeling that we best start moving out of the backwater cuts and start to focus on some main channel area. Tom and I proceeded to move and within two casts Tom hooks up quickly with a nice 28 inch walleye that completely inhaled a #7 Firetiger Deep Shad Rap. This new area that we moved to was a rather large current break that consisted of plenty of moving water with a nice current break that had some shallow 4-6 foot of gravel/sand area mixed in.

While Tom threw his Shad Rap, I opted to switch to a ¼ oz chartreuse Jimmy D’s weenie hair jig and quickly I got on the board as well with a scrappy 22" fish. The area that Tom and I were working was big enough that we slipped drifted this large current break area and kept on moving down the seam in search of some more active fish. Tom and I were greeted to plenty of walleyes that ranged from 22"-28" through out the afternoon from this area alone. We had a slight ½ hour lull where we took the opportunity to explore a couple other areas to result in just a couple fish, so we opted to move back to our spot and immediately we got hooked up once again.

With water levels dropping, Tom and I did some exploring on some of the wingdams and had nothing to show for the couple of dams we stopped at, but I think that bite is VERY close to taking off. I would opt to look at the wingdams preceding the first couple dams that are receiving the bulk of the current. It will not be long and I think the walleyes will be positioning themselves right in the heavier current on some of these prime feeding areas. I will be out later this week and I will report back my findings.