Nebraska walleye report from Sherman May 2-3, 2009

A great walleye bite at Sherman continued over the weekend and should continue for weeks to come. I was joined in my boat on Sunday by my good friend Leland Bailey from Kearney. I made a quick last minute decision on Friday evening to pack up and be ready to head to Sherman on Saturday morning. After a couple of quick phone calls Leland made arrangements to come up Saturday evening just in time to make the rules meeting for the Rose Placzek Memorial walleye tournament being held on Sunday.

I hit the water on Saturday morning to do a little prefishing. After a great weekend the week before I knew that the leadcore bite should still be a good one. I did a little looking around with my electronics and it didn’t take long to see that the fish were still stacked in the 20-25 FOW just like last week. There were way too many tournament boats in the area so I left the area alone and headed to shallow water to do some jigging and live baiting. I had a great time catching a lot of small 12-15 inch walleye and thought about how great it would be to have my nieces and nephews along. Later in the afternoon several of the tournament boats seem to thin out and I took this opportunity to get the trolling rods out for a couple of passes. It sure didn’t take long to hook up with a couple of nice 18-20 inch eyes and even a very fat 21 ½ inch fish. At this point I knew I had a game plan for tournament day.

The weather forecast for Sunday was calling for light winds becoming calm and partly cloudy skies with a high near 70!! Well the weather man was definitely wrong. It was a nice day but I don’t think the high for the day was more than 50 degrees and the winds were far from calm later in the afternoon. The skies remained cloudy most of the day and it really seemed to help keep the bite fairly steady for us throughout the day. We started out our first trolling run of the day in 22 FOW and immediately hooked into a small walleye. After a couple of passes we finally boated our first keeper of the day. It hit the measuring board at 18 ¼ inches and we made the decision to tag the fish and keep it. We really wanted to only keep fish over the 18 inch mark. This was the old length limit on Sherman before they switched to the new 15-20 inch regulations and a limit of 18 inch fish in the past would always put a team in the top of the field at the end of the day. Our morning went smooth as could be with numerous fish coming to the boat and by 11:00 Leland and I boated our 4th under slot fish and were ready to concentrate on catching an over slot fish (Greater than 28 inches). Right away we caught several between 19.5 and 21 inches and continued our hunt. We moved to the Muddy Point area around 12:30 and started to focus on the 25 – 27 FOW. There were not a lot of fish on the graph but the fish we were marking were large hooks that seemed to be active fish just off the bottom. After a pass or two Leland hooked into the dandy fish pictured above. I was convinced that this fish was easily over the 28 inch mark and couldn’t believe it was just short. After a couple of quick pictures we slipped her back into the water and continued out hunt. We ended the day without landing the big one we needed but we still finished the tournament in 7th place out of 54 boats. It was a wonderful day of fishing and I had great time fishing with Leland and look forward to the next time I can share a boat with him. Thanks Leland!!

Looking back at yesterday I think one of the key things that helped us put fish in the boat was paying close attention to our depth. For us early in the day we concentrated on the 22 to 24 FOW. The fish really seemed to stay in this depth range most of the morning and were also the most active at this depth. Another key to a successful day was keeping your crankbaits just off the bottom. Fine tuning your baits meant that you could get them dialed in to within inches of the bottom. This allowed the fish to get a hold of the bait and get hooked on both hooks. If a bait was hitting the bottom too much the fish seemed to hit the back of the bait and they would come in hooked on the back hook if they didn’t shake the bait before getting landed. Another key factor of the day was boat speed. 2 MPH was catching fish but 1.8 to 1.9 MPH was pounding the fish. I tried to pay close attention to subtle adjustments yesterday and it sure made for a great day on the water.