Mississippi River Walleyes

In the last week or so I have been on the river a handful of times. We have used quite a few different techniques to lure walleyes to the boat. Sometimes changes were made out of necessity to catch fish and other times just because. Dragging, rigging, long lining cranks and leadlining cranks have all put some fish in the boat in the last ten days.

Last week the flows were getting down to a jig dragging level in quite a few areas but as the river is, change came. With the rains came more current which in turn made us change patterns and locations to find another bite. A pretty common scenario which we deal with all the time on the river.

Blue jigs with crawlers took most of our fish last week while on the drag and most fish were in the 17 to 20 inch range. As the jig dragging slowed a little we mixed some cranks in to put a few fish in the boat although not a great bite by any stretch. Firetiger and blue were our best colors while cranking in the river.

When my Iowa crew got here late in the week we spent one whole day rigging and found that crawlers rigged on anything orange was the ticket to coax some upper teens to low twenty inch fish.
We switched things up again the following day and went to the lake and pulled cranks on lead line in 20 fow. These fish were mostly saugers but some good ones at that. They wanted #5 hot steel raps pulled at about 1.7 mph. Faster than that and it was a big fat 0.

Wednesday of this week we were back dragging jigs with either crawlers or leaches. The best combo for John Check and I turned out to be an orange 1/16th oz draggin jig and a half crawler. Dragging downstream with baits just off the bottom lured quite a few really nice fish to the boat. John had a personal best 27″ fish and ended our half day outing with a dandy 25″er.
Warm temps in the near future should be a great thing for the over all bite on the river.