Lake McConaughy Fishing Report 5-18-07 – 5-20-07

It’s that time of year for non stop action at Big Mac. The walleye, wiper, and catfish are all on the hunt for food and can be easy to catch. My cousin Pete and I headed out for the Shut Up and Fish walleye tournament this last weekend. We fished for three days and were able to get into some great eating size walleye, some drag burning wipers, and some nice cats that get you thinking you’ve hooked the new state record walleye.

We hit the water bright and early Friday morning to try to find some walleye that were away from the huge crowds of boats. We headed to a great spot we’ve fished for the last 3 or 4 years. The wind had been blowing out of the South for a few days and this was an ideal location for baitfish to get blown in to a small bay type area. We started off the day casting cranks into the shallow water. Pete hooked up with the wiper pictured above on his very first cast of the day. These things are a blast to catch. For those of you who have never caught one you know the second you hook one because your drag will scream for the first minute of the fight. I quickly reeled in my dead stick rod and quit casting because these things will circle your boat several times during their fight to the end. After 3 or 4 hard fought minutes we netted the fish. It was 24 inches and 8.5 lbs, a fun way to start off a weekend of fishing. For the next 30 minutes we managed to catch 6 wipers over 20 inches. They were in this bay gorging themselves on the baitfish that had been pushed into the shallows from a couple of days of South winds.

After the fun with the wipers we decided we better get down to business and find them eyes. We moved out to 10 to 14 feet of water and dropped live bait rigs with crawlers and leeches. We always like to look for walleyes around these groups of wipers. The wipers feed so fast and furious that they injure as many baitfish as they eat. The walleye will always be nearby waiting for that easy meal of injured shad or alewife. It didn’t take us long to catch a couple of nice eyes over 20 inches. These were perfect slot fish for a tournament so we left this spot alone and headed to the next. We hit several other areas on the other side of the lake that had produced in years past but we couldn’t catch any walleyes so we headed back to the wind blown side of the lake. We spent the rest of the day catching a fair amount of walleyes on crawlers and leaches in several different areas. We tried trolling for a while and couln’t find a trolling bite. We had heard of people catching some good fish trolling but we just couldn’t dial them in. We ended our day of prefishing with a limit of eaters for each of us.

Saturday morning we woke up to some brutal wind but it didn’t last long. By the time we headed to the boat ramp the wind had died to only a light breeze. At tournament take off we headed to the same spot we fished first on Friday. We were hoping to still find the same 20 inch fish that were there the day before. We dropped our live bait rigs with crawlers and within the first couple of minutes I had on a big wiper. We moved out just a little deeper to avoid the wipers and found our walleye. We boated 2 walleye that were right at 20 inches. We then struggled there and had to move on to a new area. It was a little crowded but there were plenty of fish to be caught. We got our 5 fish we could take to the scales and decided to go troll crank baits for some big fish. We tied on Flicker Shads and Rapala Shad Raps and headed to the west end of the lake to troll. We caught a few short walleye and then it hit. We thought we had a great fish to replace one smaller. Turned out to be about a 7 pound channel cat. What a let down during a tournament. We finished the day taking our tournament limit of 5 fish to the scales and ended up in 55th place for the end of day 1.

Day 2 was a little different for most of the field. We had some big thunderstorms move though the area over night and it made the fish a little reluctant to bite. We tried a few new areas for a very short time first thing in the morning and then moved on to try to get a quick 5 fish before looking for big ones. Well we struggled up until 12:00 and hadn’t caught a walleye yet. With 2 1/2 hours to go we finally hit the crowds. Lots of boats were leaving and we found out that the bite was nearly dead compared to the day before. We managed to pull a couple of decent 17-18 inch fish out of the area and then had to move to another crowed area to try get a few more. We were able to get the last few we needed including a very fat 20.5 incher. We ended the tournament with a 2 day total weight of 19.92 and finished right around 32nd place out of 135 teams. (We haven’t seen the FINAL results yet.)

With the long holiday weekend this next weekend, McConaughy would be a great place to take the kids to camp and catch a lot of great fish. With the low water levels you can camp just about anywhere along the miles and miles of sandy shorelines. The last photo here was taken while we were waiting in line for the boat ramp at the tournament. At full pool we would have been just a few yards from the waters edge. It’s a sad site to see this lake not getting any better but there is still a lot of water out there to fish and there is still a lot of fish to be caught.