Lake Oahe South Dakota Walleye Report – Part 2

Lake Oahe in South Dakota has quickly become one of my favorite waters to fish for walleye. After getting the chance to spend 13 days chasing walleyes in the Mobridge area I can assure you I will be returning to the area not only to fish but to chase down a few of the area pheasants as well.

My adventure to Lake Oahe started last spring when my tournament partner / cousin, Pete Meister and I won the 1st Annual State Farm Open Walleye Tournament on Sherman Reservoir in Nebraska. It was an automatic qualifier for the 2008 Cabela’s National Team Championship. At that time the location of the NTC had not been decided but we were going to make sure that we were ready for where ever it might take us. Sometime in January an announcement was made that the NTC was going to be in Mobridge, SD. This is when our planning started. We booked some rooms with our friend Jim Keller at Lakeside Cabins in Mobridge and couldn’t wait for the time to come. After hearing that the PWT was going to have a regional event in Mobridge I decided to get signed up as a co-angler. What better way to prefish for a tournament. I knew that all the PWT pros would have several days of prefishing under their belts and would have to share with me what they thought was their best knowledge of that water. (Check out my PWT report here. )

Pete and I headed to Mobridge a week before the NTC tournament to start practicing. I felt like I was a little bit ahead of others because I had fished the PWT. On our first day on the lake in my boat we did very well. We started off trolling Flicker Shads and BPS Static Shads on lead core in 27 feet of water. I wanted to put some miles in and get Pete familiar with the lake and by late afternoon we found ourselves over 25 miles from the boat ramp and on some really decent fish. We kept track of largest fish of the day and figured the best 5 totaled just under 16 lbs. Over the next several days we did a lot more trolling and made some adjustments to our target depths and tried several different baits. It seemed that when we were catching bigger fish, we were catching fewer fish. This is not a bad thing but it sure had us thinking that we would need to have a backup plan in the event we needed a couple of fish late in the day during the tournament. With only a couple of days of prefishing to go we found a few areas close to the boat launch area that were holding good numbers of fish. The easiest way to catch a lot of these fish fast was with a bottom bouncer and the new Slow Death hooks. We were hoping we wouldn’t have to resort to this but we had to have a plan for it. On our last day of prefishing we had to be off the water by 12:00. We checked the forecast and seen that the wind was going to come up by mid morning. We decided on our best spots and treated the last day of prefishing just like it was tournament day. This would give us a good idea of how long it would take us to make the 27 mile trip South on calm water and the trip back in some rough water. This turned out to be the best day of the trip. We only caught around 10 walleye that morning but by 10:30 we had a 23.75”, 21.5”, 19.75”, 19.75”, and 19.00”. We guessed this to give around 16 lbs and this was exactly what we wanted for the tournament. We made the rough boat ride back to the boat ramp and soon knew how long it would take us to make the long run to our best spot in both calm and windy conditions.

Day one of the tournament we woke up to some extremely windy conditions. Wind gusts were in excess of 45 mph overnight and were blowing a steady 30-35mph at take off. We knew the boat ride was going to be a long wet ride and our best spot was going to be very difficult to fish. We decided out best baits from practice were Reef Runners in the 800 series in various colors. We had everything rigged and ready and headed to our spot. The ride was long and wet but we made it and soon found out it was going to be a challenge to just control the boat. In order to stay on our contour one of us would control the speed with the kicker while the other would do the steering up front on the bow mount. This was a very difficult and dangerous situation with the cross wind. The wind and the waves were tremendous. I had my 101 pounds of thrust trolling motor running at 100% and was still struggling to stay in the zone we needed to be in. Pete was trying to get the baits in the water when I hear him yell “FISH ON”. A few short seconds later the fish came unbuttoned and we continued forward. While Pete was getting the 4th and final rod in the water we had another fish on only to loose it seconds later too. At first it was discouraging but we knew we needed to take a deep breath and try to get used to the conditions we were in. We had to get through a few tangles and fowled baits but we soon settled into a groove. At around 10:30 we finally landed a 19 7/8 “ slot! What a perfect first fish. We tagged the fish and dropped her in the livewell and continued our battle. Around 11:00 we started to see an increase in the winds. Finally after taking 3 large waves over the bow of the boat and the kicker motor stalling because it was under water, we decided the situation was getting far too dangerous and we decided to head to the other side of the lake to calmer water. We knew the area was decent from prefishing it but we hadn’t spent a lot of time there. We soon discovered that the fish were biting and the sizes were what we were looking for. We tagged a 19.75” and a 19.5”. This would take care of our 3 slot fish and now we needed a couple over 20 inches. Our very next fish was a 21.5” fish that we regrettably threw back. The bite was so good in this area that we were convinced we could do better. Finally around 2:30 we connected with fat 23.25” fish that had us very excited with only one more fish to go. With the wind still blowing over 30 MPH we knew we were going to have to keep a 5th and final fish soon and start our long run back to the check in boat. With an hour and a half to go we decided to keep an 18.5” and start the long ride back to the check-in boat. After weighing in we had 14.54 lbs and were sitting in 8th place.

Day 2 brought much better conditions with calm winds at the start of the tournament and only forecasted to blow from 7-15 mph. What a relief! With the launch order reversed for day 2 we were going to be the 14th boat out and would have a smooth ride to our spot. After a short 33 minute ride we arrived at our first spot and began fishing. We managed to catch a handful of small fish right away but we couldn’t connect with any we wanted to tag. With this day being a Saturday we were definitely seeing a lot more boat traffic on the lake and the break we were trolling was becoming very popular with live bait fishermen. We soon headed to our second spot and continued to catch several more walleye in the 16.5-17.25 range. We knew we needed better fish to stay in the top 10. By 12:30 in the afternoon we still did not have a fish in the livewell. Finally around 1:00 we tagged our first 19.75” eye and had a second 19.75” less than 20 minutes later. With no more fish coming from this area we decided we needed to hit a few more spots. We decided on a couple of areas that were on the way back to the check-in boat . We had to switch our technique to slow death for a while then back to trolling and finally back to slow death again. Our time was running short and we only had 2 fish in the livewell. We finally had to resort to our “numbers” spot just a few miles north of the check-in boat. Right away we started knocking them dead on slow death and it didn’t take long to pick up a much needed 20.50” fish for our third fish. The next 2 fish will probably forever haunt me because we threw back a couple of 17.5 inch fish and couldn’t find a single one any bigger. We finally ended our day with less than 10 minutes to go by tagging a couple of fish in the 16” range. We really considered ourselves lucky to get 5 fish that day but we really wanted to take a chance on winning the tournament. We had a total weight for day 2 of 10.51 lbs and a 2 day total of 25.05 lbs. We finished 26th overall and were the first team out of All American status. It’s been a bit of a bummer but that’s the breaks of tournament fishing. We’re trying to learn from our decisions and we’ll try to make better ones the next time.

We had a great time with lots of friends fishing this tournament. We all worked together on a few things and we all had respectable finishes. I’m certainly looking forward to my next trip to Lake Oahe and can’t wait to get back on the water soon.