Walleyes Forever |
Following the Crowd
PWT pro from Powell, Wyo. A new lake and where do we go to find the walleyes? The guy at the bait shop said look for a crowd of boats and told us what to use. Do I follow the crowd all bunched up on the point or go searching on my own? It’s basic instinct for most of us to go to the crowd after all they must be catching walleyes or they would not be all bunched up there. What happens after we get there is the difference between watching everybody else catching a few fish -- or to dare to be different from the rest and catch a lot of fish. With the popularity of walleye fishing today we are not going to find to many places to ourselves. Unpressured walleyes would sure be nice, but it’s not going to happen too often anymore. There are a few places where we can find a spot to ourselves, but it takes time to find them and most everybody does not have that kind of time to spend searching new waters for unpressured walleyes. So we resort to following the crowd and doing what has been working and maybe catching a few fish. To consistently catch more fish than the rest of the boats on a point or flat we need to be different than the rest. This can be anything from a different bait with a different presentation or the same bait presented differently. The guy at the bait shop said to pull spinner rigs with crawlers real slow. Try the same spinner rig but speed it up. Rip it through the crowd, in and out of the boats, at two to three times the speed they are going. Walleyes, like most fish, get accustomed to seeing the same thing and it will slow them down, but here it comes fast. Sometimes they just cannot resist a bait that’s going fast and the nice thing about going fast is there is no peck-peck or just an extra weight to the line. Speed causes bone jarring strikes and the walleyes will hook themselves almost every time. Maybe switch from live bait to plastics. Live bait does catch walleyes almost all the time, but switching to plastics can sometimes be the difference between a few fish and a limit of fish. Another thing I like about plastics, I don't get my hands dirty and I don’t have to worry about keeping them alive. The Exude baits in the Mister Twister line fit the bill nicely and they have a plastic to imitate anything that swims. Pressured walleyes will sometimes go belly to the bottom. These fish aren’t necessarily neutral, but are tight to the bottom because the pressure has put them there. We do have to have good electronics to find these fish. In my case, the Bottomline 5300 does an excellent job of showing these bottom-hugging walleyes. The walleyes are still here, but now we need to find what is going to make them bite. Maybe pulling crankbaits through a crowd of boats can make the difference that the walleyes want. Pulling crankbaits also plays into the speed factor cause we are generally going faster, plus exposing our baits to more fish and putting baits in front of more active fish as well. Always keep in tune to what is happening around you at all times. Maybe a wind has kicked up and it has the walleyes pushed up in the shallows where most of the other boats won’t dare to go. Take that journey into the shallows and here you’ve found an area by a crowd to yourself. Be extremely careful not to let the other boats know that you are catching fish in there. Keep the net extremely low or release the fish in the water at the side of the boat away from the crowd. If anybody sees the net go up, I will guarantee it will not take long before others come in shallow to investigate. A crowd of boats in shallow water can push walleyes away in a hurry. Try searching for walleyes over deep water at the same depth as you were fishing in the crowd. Walleyes will sometimes go and suspend away from the pressure in deep water. Here it is important not to fish below those walleyes. They are at the same depth as they were on the point only now they are over the deep water and suspended. Most fisherman make the mistake of fishing deeper only because they depth has increased where they are fishing. The electronics can tell us if the fish are there and at what depth. Now we’ve found fish by a crowd but not in the crowd. Again be sneaky and you can enjoy a big numbers day when everybody else is only catching a few walleyes. Whatever the answer is to more fish in a crowd, it usually has to do with daring to be different than the rest. Everything I’ve mentioned has made a big difference for me in and around a crowd. And with all the pressure on walleyes today, being different when we follow a crowd can usually lead to a big day of fishing. | |
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