Sherman Reservoir walleye report 4-22-09 – 4-26-09

The Nebraska Walleye Association kicked off their 2009 season this past weekend at Sherman Reservoir in central Nebraska. The fishing was great, despite major swings in the weather, with several nice fish brought to the scales. It’s been anything but a normal spring at Sherman. The spawn was late even though ice out was right on time and somehow typical spring patterns finally fell back into place this last weekend after a few days of abnormally hot weather. New regulations on walleye at this lake were going to force tournament fishermen to make some tough decisions and also cause a lot of disappointment when those 20 – 28 inch fish have to be immediately released.

I got a little jump start on the prefishing by heading up early on Wednesday. There were only a couple of other tournament boats on the water that day and it was a beautiful day to be on the water. After dropping the boat in I headed to the dam to look around with my sonar. I was interested to see if there were still some male walleye hanging around this typical spawning area. I watched the electronics closely while I pitched my favorite Firecracker and Chartreuse Ringworm and it didn’t take long to see that there weren’t too many fish left in the area. Knowing that the majority of the males were gone from the area I set out to fish one of my favorite spots in the entire state of Nebraska. It’s amazing how programmed these fish tend to get when they are hungry after the spawn. I started live bait rigging about 40 yards from my favorite waypoint and in less than 5 minutes I was hooked up with a dandy! This fish hit the measuring board at 29.5 inches. What a great feeling to know that a post spawn pattern from a couple of years ago could repeat for me again. A big thanks goes to Brian Robinson for helping me do some prefishing on Wednesday and for taking some photos of this great fish. As my prefishing continued over the next few days we found some patterns that were putting fish in the boat. After talking with teammates we finally came up with a solid plan to put some fish in the boat for the tournament by trolling leadcore and then doing some livebait rigging to try to get a “over 28 inch” fish.

On Saturday morning we awoke to a major change in the weather from the previous three days. The high for the day was forecasted to be 35 degrees cooler than Friday. The anglers were all hoping that the fish weren’t going to go into shock with the weather change. Overall the day wasn’t too bad. The bite seemed to hold steady throughout the day with a couple of short periods of really good bites. A couple of my teammates were able to get their 4 fish between 15-20 inches and start looking for a big one. Pete and myself on the other hand struggled to get 4 smaller fish. We had two great fish but just seemed to be landing a lot of fish in the 13-14 inch range. Around midday I had a dandy fish on only to lose it 30 seconds into the battle. We had been noticing all day that fish were nipping the back hook of the crankbaits and in turn several fish would come off after a few seconds. To try to get them to hit the crank better we slowed our trolling speed down a little and tried to make sure the baits were off the bottom a little rather than doing a little digging. This seemed to help us out with several fish starting to get hooked on the front hooks too. The day ended with 2 fish just under the 20 inch mark and our total weight for the day was 4.66 lbs and helped up to finish in the middle of the pack.

Sunday was forecasted to be a little warmer than Saturday but there was a good chance at having some rain. The wind wasn’t blowing as hard as Saturday but it did change direction a couple times throughout the day. This also seemed to get the fish to move to different depths. One big key to the weekend was to make sure that the fish were on the electronics. If they seemed to thin out you needed to move out to deeper water or move in a little more shallow. Our first two fish on day two came to the boat fairly quick and we were able to settle down and really concentrate on trolling speed and keeping the baits perfectly in the zone to keep our hooking percentage up. Around 10:30 or so we hooked into a fish that Pete and I, along with several others that witnessed it, will not soon forget. What took us several minutes or so to land turned out to be the biggest flathead catfish we’ll ever see in our entire lives. This fish has had me losing sleep at night since we caught it. Since we were in a walleye tournament it was quickly photographed and released and it wasn’t until I got home and looked at the pictures on Monday morning that I realized what we had in the boat. This catfish was definitely over 55 inches long and was probably the new Nebraska state record by several pounds!!! What a experience this was to have with my best friend/cousin Pete. We have done a lot of fishing together since we were 5 years old and this is another great addition to our long story book. Congrats Pete!! I sure wish there was something we could have done to get it in the books. At least this beast has a chance to continue to grow and maybe make some angler very lucky some day. Maybe it can be one of our kids. That catfish turned out to be a little bit of a lucky charm for us. It wasn’t a half hour later I landed a 28.5 inch walleye that helped us to finish 4th in the Sunday tournament.

Congrats to my teammates for great finishes over the weekend. For the 2 one day tournaments our team had 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 11th place finishes. We’re all off to a great start this season and I can’t wait to see how things go for us in a couple of weeks at Lewis and Clark.