Mississippi River MN Pool 4 Walleye Fishing Report

Here’s a one day report from the big river that should help steer you in the right direction if you’re looking to spend a little extra time looking for a bigger fish or two. If you want numbers, head to the dam with your box of sonars but if a little piece and solitude is to your liking, drop well downstream and hit the rocks for a shot at a much better fish!

I fished Saturday with Steve Mark, son Alex and brother in-law Mark with the goal of teaching this crew how to cast jigs for walleye. We got started right after sun up and headed down stream from Everts Resort to a long stretch of rip rap and natural rock that had been giving up fair numbers of nicer sized fish. Things started off a bit slow, as they have been lately, but got rolling about 8:30 AM when Steve Mark put two dandy walleyes in the boat, both caught on 1/8 oz. hair jigs – kelly green was the color of choice on this day. We were throwing a combination of hair and plastics; black & kelly green in the bucktails and "anything purple" in the ringies and firecracker and chartreuse pearl in k-grubs. Jig weights were kept very light 3/32 – 1/8 oz. to allow for a very slow sink rate as the fish had been very inactive and non-aggressive of late. Most fish were caught in 8′ – 10′ of water but the complete absense of wind mading fishing these super light heads an absolute breeze.

As I said earlier, we headed for a long stretch of rip rap but we found we could narrow down our search area rather quickly by targeting stretches were the deeper water cut right up to shore… areas where the bottom slowly slid out to deeper water proved a complete waste of time and this little locational observation has really held true for over the last week. Keep this little nugget in mind the next time you’re out and you’ll spend more time on the right fish and less time catching sheepshead as those little buggers are holed up along the shallower stretches of rock.

We are having our best luck of late fishing our baits very non-aggressively. No hopping, popping or snapping of the bait has been best… just allow a slow and natural sink of the lure seems to be working the best and strikes have been on the light side.

Alex is shown in our first photo ‘lipping’ a nice walleye caught on a 1/8 oz. kelly green bucktail jig and was released after a quick photo. A good number of the fish we’ve been catching along these rip rap areas have been over 20 inches and have been set loose but we have been able to put together some good numbers of the 17 – 18 inch fish as well for eaters so it is possible to have your cake and eat it too!

In this second photo Mark is shown with a 14 inch crappie he caught on a hair jig. This crappie really had these guys excited… but I was convinced this fish didn’t go a hair over 12 inches… so I told them to throw it on the ruler to check. Turns out this fish was a strong 14 inches and I’m forced to admit that my crappie guesstimation skills need some fine-tuning AND apparently I’ve been throwing back some HUGE crappies lately as I’ve had several much larger and not really even known what I had at the time! My bad for not being much of a crappie guy.

This point of that whole deal was to draw attention to what has to be one of the best populations of HUGE crappies I’ve seen on the river for as long as I can remember. We’re catching 6-8-10 of them a day and we are NOT targeting them in the least. Ever caught a crappie on a k-grub or ringworm? The big one’s just snarf them right up and I can’t help but think a guy could just have a field day with these buggers if they actually went out after them. Look a bit deeper for these crappies, about 12 ‘ – 14’ off deep rip rap. The schools are tightly bunched and large. A slip bobber and a small minnow should do wonders as would smaller plastics or real light hair.

River conditions are excellent and I’m a bit excited about the precipitation we’ve had so far today in the form of snow and the possibility of heavy rain later tonight. I’m convinced that a quick jump in river levels would throw the bite on the river into over-drive so I’m just praying for a good, hard soaking rain across central MN later tonight.

Dustin fished Sunday and he told me the fish were VERY cooperative during the second half of the day so look for a report from him on that bite sometime tomorrow.

See ya’ all on the river!

All photos can be clicked on and enlarged for a larger view!