Strike up a conversation with someone about winter walleye fishing techniques and one of the first words that will often come up is finese. It’s not surprising considering we’ve all been pre-conditioned to think that walleyes, especially in winter, are as finicky as they come. OK, now take that notion, crumple it up into a little ball and throw it out the window!
Up until recently I had fallen victim to the same line of thinking… But it all changed a few winters ago when I decided to set a tip-up soaking a big sucker minnow in shallow near my favorite walleye location looking to catch a pike or two while I waited for the "primetime" walleye bite to begin. No more than 5 minutes had passed when I had my first flag and to my surprise landed not a northern pike but to this day my biggest walleye through the ice at 29 1/4". Was it a fluke? Let’s just say that no more than 15 minutes had passed before I iced my 2nd walleye on a sucker minnow, a healthy 26" piggie. I couldn’t have been more surprised. Shallow water? Daylight?? Sucker minnow??? Weeds??!! This isn’t how you’re supposed to catch walleyes!
What I’ve found over the past few years of playing around with this approach is that not only was it not a fluke, but running big minnows under tip-ups can actually be one of the most effective early season techniques for icing huge walleyes and will often put more fish on the ice than any other approach. Even on days when the bite is slow there is something irresistable about a big minnow that hungry eyes just can’t turn down. Not only is this techniqe deadly along weedlines and shallow structure, but I’ve also found that suckers and big shiners under tip-ups can work equally as well in deeper water along sand/mud transitions or even out along the edge of the mud flats.
Now don’t get me wrong, while it may seem simple yet effective way to put fish on the ice there is actually a ton of fine tuning and thought that goes into how and where I set my tip-ups. As an example this past weekend we were fishing next to several other groups who were also running tip-ups and I’d say we had at least 5 times as many flags and even more hook-ups because of a few minor differences in our approach.
The bottom line is that tip-up fishing can be an extremely effective weapon to add to any walleye fisherman’s arsenal and when it works it REALLY works! Tune in to FSN on Sunday to see just how effective early season tip-up fishing can be for big ‘Eyes!