Mississippi River – Pool 4 Report Memorial Weekend

My plan for my trips late last week was to do a quick look-around in the backwaters on the upper end of Pool 4 north of Lake Pepin and if the fish didn’t cooperate I’d make tracks for the north end of the lake.

I never did make it to the lake and the fishing north of Pepin in the side channels is running strong!

My trip on Friday was spent with Amy and Mike Kopetz and their daughter Joan. We had planned to fish thursday and friday but the strong storms going through the river valley on thursday convinced us to sit out Round 1 and wait for better weather.

As I mentioned my plan was to do a quick look-around some of my favorite backwaters and side cuts before heading out into the lake. I expected we’d be able to break out the planer boards and crankbaits out on the lake and get into better numbers than I’ve been seeing up in the river of late but the fish in the river were really on the chew early in the AM on Friday.

We used two main techniques to catch our fish; dragging jigs tipped with livebait and longline trolling cranks. The jigs were producing an assortment of fish with crawlers and leeches producing at an even pace. Jighead weights were 1/16th of an ounce. With the near absense of wind on friday our jig fishing was a breeze… no pun intended.

The method used to fish these light jigs is to set your boat up on the edge of the current seam being fished, on this day most of our fish were caught in 5′ – 7′ of water. Let the boat start drifting downstream with the current and make a long cast back behind the boat so the boat is downstream of the bait. The bail is closed and the rod tip is held high. When a walleye hits your bait you "give the fish the tip" to allow for a couple extra seconds of slack line for the fish to inhale the bait… and then you bring the noise with a long sweeping hookset to drive the hook point home.

The "structure" we were targeting was a sandflat with pronounced variations in the depth. One second you’re drifting in 6′ of water and then the bottom drops out and the depth drops to 8′ of water. This "washboarding" of the sand provides perfect resting and ambush points for the walleyes and a light jig gently falling down into one of these troughs is tough to resist. Given the near absence of snags in this area we were able to fish Precision Heads and our hook up ratio was excellent.

If you jig is constantly dragging bottom you reel up a little slack line. If you haven’t tapped bottom in 10 seconds or more… you let out a little extra until you tap bottom.

This could quite possibly be one of the most enjoyable and easy to learn techniques I use on trips. Its angler against walleye on a light spinning rod, 6# mono and a 1/16th ounce jig between you and the fish!

Amy Kopetz shown top-right had the hot hand early and didn’t slow down until the boat was on the trailer. She started the day with a 22.5" sauger (not shown here) caught dragging jigs and then followed up that dandy sauger with the 29" walleye shown above-right that she caught on the upstream pass pulling crankbaits over the same sandflat.

Amy was feeling a little sheepish about hogging up all the fish so she gave up her hot rod that just caught the 29" walleye to her daughter and started trolling with her daughter’s rod, rigged with a #5 firetiger shad rap. Wouldn’t you know it… we hardly got going on our next upstream trolling pass and Amy sticks another walleye, this time a dandy 25" fish shown in the second photo, on her daughter’s rod.

Our larger walleyes for the day came on #5 Bleeding Hot Olive & Firetiger Shad Raps longlined in 7′ of water and the numbers fell to the jigs tipped with bait.

A couple observations…

We caught more fish at trolling speeds in excess of 2.5 MPH but ALL of our larger fish were caught at 2.0 – 2.2 MPH. We had 5 – 6 fish in the low 20" range that we released and every one caught on a crank hit the crank at the lower trolling speeds while our 16" – 18" fish were willing to chase the baits at the higher speeds.

Our jig colors seemed to make a big difference to our success. Typically this time of year I’m fishing a great deal of blue and black but those darker colors didn’t turn a fish on Friday. Instead the brighter colored Precision Heads like the orange chartreuse, sour apple and chartruese sunburst shown in the last photo stayed very active.

Late May and through June is one of the most productive times to be fishing the upper part of Pool 4. The scenery is awesome, wildlife is everywhere and the fishing is about as consistent as anything to be found anywhere. IF you get a chance to give it a try I’m sure you’ll have a fantastic time!