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Tips for fishing walleye in the spring
In the early spring, its tough to beat live bait rigs for tough-to-catch walleye.
By Bob Alexander
They may not leap like a rainbow or run like a chinook, but walleye nonetheless have a lot going for them as a game fish. They grow to a reasonably large size, they taste terrific and they can be found in a very wide variety of habitats. Closed seasons excepted, you can fish for them pretty much year-round, using an enormous variety of techniques. In fact, one of the walleye anglers biggest challenges is deciding where and how he wants to tackle his favorite fish on any given day. But in the early spring, when walleye have just completed spawning, thats an easy decision. In that cool water, nothing beats live bait rigs. True, you can catch lots of fish on jigs, or even get a few on crankbaits. But the simple truth is that youre missing out on a lot of action if youre not running bait.
Bait rigs are unbeatable in early spring for a number of reasons. For starters, post-spawn walleye in cool water are hardly feeding like wild. Bigger female walleye tend to sulk for a week or more after spawning, and even the smaller, more aggressive males tend to be sluggish in that cool spring water. Being cold-blooded creatures, their metabolism is still in low gear. Chasing down crankbaits isnt high on their priority list.
Bait rigs fit this situation perfectly though. The smell and action of a live bait appeals to fish at even the slowest retrieve, or even when fished still on bottom or beneath a float. Walleye can look at a bait for a long, long time before finally being induced to eat.
Baits also do something no jig or crankbait can, and thats respond to the walleyes approach. The alarm response of a minnow as a walleye comes closer to take a sniff can often trigger a curious fish to bite. When youre dealing with reluctant fish in cool water, any edge helps. The other great point about baits is that theyre ideal for use in places where you know the fish are concentrated in a given area, as is usually the case with spring walleye. You dont need to go looking for fish like you do later in the year. Chances are, they will be located in specific spots an ideal situation for bait fishing.
Baits For Spring Walleye
So now that Ive outlined the merits of bait fishing, the question becomes, which bait do you choose? Walleye respond to most live baits, with minnows, worms and leeches perennial favorites. Ive also seen walleye caught on roe, waxworms, maggots, crayfish and frogs. Decisions, decisions.
I tend to stick with worms, leeches and minnows, as these three baits are readily available just about anywhere, and theyre consistently successful. I will often have all three in my boat at once, but will normally elect to use one or the other based upon water temperature.
Minnows are by far the cold water favorite. Not only do smaller fish form the biggest part of any walleyes diet, but they seem to do best as a bait in the cooler temperatures of early spring. Where I live in Ontario, walleye are protected by a closed season during spring spawning. By the time the season opens, water temperatures generally range from 52 to 57 degrees F. In water that cold, worms and leeches ball up and do little to entice a hit. So early in the year, I start by fishing minnows.
Anglers can be picky, fussing over minute details relating to rods, reels, lines and boats, yet the same people can be surprisingly lax when it comes to bait. Thats always surprised me, since nothing can make or break your day like quality bait. Im almost fanatical when it comes to minnow selection.
Walleye eat just about any smaller fish they can get their mouth around, but that doesnt mean anything goes when youre selecting bait. You have to match the hatch, as the fly fishermen say. Savvy tournament anglers always try to buy their bait as close to the fishing site as possible. That way, youll be sure to get the very same minnows walleye are accustomed to eating in a given lake or river. If no bait is available nearby, of if its of poor quality, then you have to compromise. Golden shiners, emerald shiners, spot-tail shiners, and redbelly dace are always good choices. With golden shiners probably the best of all. Theyre relatively hardy on a hook, they stand up to live wells and bait buckets well, and walleye love them.
The key to making the most from minnows is to keep them in cool, shaded, oxygenated water. Your boats live well is the best place of all to store them. Minnows are always good baits for walleye, though there are times when worms or leeches work even better. That generally occurs as the water warms to the 60 degree F mark. Lets get this out of the way up front leeches are not blood suckers, and they will not attack you when you dip your hand into the bait pail to grab one. The leeches sold in bait stores are northern ribbon leeches, harmless to man, feasted upon by walleye wherever theyre found.
Leeches have an incredible action in the water thats unlike anything else. Theyre also tough enough to withstand a reasonable amount of chewing, so you can catch more than one walleye on a single leech or, at the very least, withstand repeated attacks by rock bass without continually having to change baits. Leeches are also a lot easier to cart around than a pail of minnows a little Styrofoam tub holds all you need. Be sure to keep them out of the sun though. Heat will kill leeches quickly. I like to store them in the little Styrofoam tub theyre sold in, kept on ice in a cooler. As leeches take over from minnows with warming water, worms take over from leeches as my primary walleye bait once the surface water reaches 65 degrees or so. Worms are also a go-to bait when walleye are really fussy, such as after a spring storm.
The biggest problem with worms, of course, is that panfish love them. Worms for walleye fishing should be big, fat, healthy dew worms fished whole on light wire hooks. The bigger, the better. Again, the key is to be selective about your bait. Picking and conditioning your own is the best way to go (see sidebar). There are entire books on the subject of how to rig baits for walleye fishing. But when you look at bait fishing in an early spring context, three approaches will get you through 99 per cent of the situations youre likely to encounter.
Slip Sinker Rigs
By far and away the most effective all-round set-up for spring walleye fishing, the slip sinker rig is simple to tie, versatile, and frighteningly effective.
The concept to a slip sinker rig is that your line slides through the sinker rather than having it fixed in position. That way, a walleye can eat the bait without feeling any resistance from the sinker. When the fish takes the bait and moves off, it pulls slack line, again feeling no resistance. You can see your line move however, alerting you to the hit and giving you your cue to set the hook. The precise rigging varies. Walking-style sinkers, made popular by the famous Lindy Rig, are the most commonly used as they tend to resist snags in shallow water, whether youre casting or slowly trolling. Quick-change walking sinkers allow you to select lighter or heavier rigs at will. You can even select colored sinkers if the mood strikes, and you feel the extra visibility will help.
To tie the basic rig, youll need a walking sinker, a small barrel swivel, a small, fine wire hook and a tiny plastic bead. Tie the hook to your line, then cut the line about two to three feet higher up. You tie the tag end with the hook to one end of the swivel, then thread the sinker, then the plastic bead, onto the other piece of line before tying it to the other end of the swivel. The swivel keeps your sinker from sliding all the way down to the hook and tangling. The plastic bead protects your knot from abrasion against the sinker. The whole works takes about a minute to tie. Presto. One Lindy Rig.
In places where snags are really bad, you can substitute a Lindy No-Snagg for the walking sinker. Or, take a six-inch piece of scrap line, double it over your main line above the swivel, and pinch several split shot on it to form a crude sliding weight. When you get stuck, a firm pull on the rod will strip the snagged split shot off the doubled-over scrap line, saving the rest of the rig.
You can lengthen your lead (the line between the swivel and your hook) if walleye are traveling higher in the water column. Tournament anglers fish slip sinker rigs with leads of up to six feet. Or, you can shorten it down to a foot or so if walleye are really hugging the bottom.
Slip sinker rigs work so well because they present your bait on bottom, where the walleye generally spend most of their time, in a way that keeps the fish from detecting the weight of the sinker when they bite. Slip sinker set-ups generally work through snags well, making them great bets for use below dams, in current areas such as a lake narrows, or in the fast water below water falls. Theyre the seasoned walleye anglers standard bait rig for spring fishing.
Floating Jig Heads
Really an adaptation of the standard slip sinker rig, the floating jig head is another go-to presentation for spring walleye. As its name suggests, a floating jig head uses a Styrofoam head rather than traditional lead, so it floats up high where the fish can see it. Theyre unbeatable on cluttered bottoms, when fishing over short weeds, in very rocky areas, or in any other situation where a bait could become lost amid bottom debris.
When you buy floating jig heads, spend the extra to get heads with premium quality hooks. If you cant find any to your liking, then its time to adapt. You can take the steelheaders approach and use a bead-style float with a regular hook instead. Wordens Lil Corky and Spin-n-Glo are just at home on a walleye lake as they are on a Pacific Northwest steelhead river. These little floaters not only keep your bait out of the bottom debris, but they also add color and, in the case of the Spin-n-Glo, a bit of action besides. If youre fishing worms, you dont even need to use extra floats on your line simply give the worm a shot of air, using a hypodermic needle or a Lindy Worm Blower. The air-injected worm will float right up over the snags.
Bobber Rigs
When the snags are really bad, or when youre fishing vertically alongside cover like weed lines or sunken trees, or youre fishing in strong currents, nothing works better than a simple bobber rig.
Basic bobber rigs have come a long way from the round plastic floats we used as kids to catch perch and sunfish. Modern designs, shaped like teardrops or little barrels on a stick, hold a ton of weight yet being so slender in shape, submerge at the slightest touch. Fixed bobbers attach to your line via two small chunks of surgical tubing, which you thread onto the line before tying on the hook. You then add a couple of split shot for weight, position the float at the appropriate depth, and bait up.
For fishing deeper areas, a slip bobber works even better. The slip bobber works along the same principle as a sliding sinker your line slips through it until a small neoprene or plastic stopper, attached to your line at the depth you want to fish, interrupts its progress.
I recall one morning fishing the fast water below a hydro dam in central Ontario with slip bobber rigs baited with leeches. My companion and I knew the water below the dam was about 25 feet, but with a bottom consisting of broken rock and debris. Fishing the bottom would have resulted in numerous snags, so we both rigged up with slip floats, setting our neoprene bobber stops about 22 feet above the hook. Three large split shot, positioned a foot and a half above the hook, would take our leeches down to the walleye. A half-dozen other anglers were already been fishing the dam pool as we rigged up. After we landed six plump walleye between us in a span of about 40 minutes, the other anglers began frantically rummaging through their tackle boxes looking for bobbers. Soon, they were all set up identically, with a plastic red and white bobber clipped a foot and a half above their baits. Not one of them noticed our floats sliding down the line as we reeled in. After we landed two more chunky walleye, one of the other anglers came over to us, begging to know what we were using for bait. We clued him in on our slip bobber set-up, set him and his son up with slip floats, and soon afterwards they too were into walleyes. As that little story demonstrates, spring walleye can be easy to catch providing you use the right baits with the right presentations. Live bait rigs will outproduce just about any other technique in those cool spring waters. Though bait can be a bit more fuss to use than hardware, Ill take fish on the line over convenience any time.
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