5 Tips to make your next trip a memorable one!

This Past weekend has been one for the memory banks for sure. The bite has been steady and fast with clients enjoying limits of tasty green bay walleye for the fryer. I'll jump into a more in depth report in this post but first i just wanted to thank everyone for the amazing charter season so far !! This has been quite the year with a lot of amazing clients. You all make this job that I do so much fun!

Green Bay Walleye Fishing Report

The bite over the last 2 weeks has been very consistent, with limits of walleye and fast! Finding the fish has been the key as they have been slightly moving around day to day and the guys willing to adapt and not just fish the old waypoints have been hammering down on fish quickly. Colors have changed a bit from day to day and times of day have changed a bit.

Changing with the weather

So if you look at the weather and its just crazy different from the day before don't be afraid to jump in the boat and go look at what's new from the last day. Fishing in every kind of weather patter or challenge will only make you a better angler for it!

I'll use this last week as an example. Thursday after work I met a nice couple from WI at the launch at 5 pm. We took off and I had not been on the water in over a week as my wife and i took a little vacation, so I knew I had to start out on the search and do it quickly as we only had 3.5 hours of fishing time scheduled. I took off out of bay shore with flat calm winds and a bright evening sun thinking I was going to go check some rock structure to the south first with 2 other spots in mind if I struck out on spot one. So here are a few of my tips that i try and follow every trip out.

1. Make A plan before you head out on the water, I always have an idea of 2 or 3 spots I want to look at that I feel will hold fish.

2. Manage your time, don't let yourself sit on inactive fish waiting on a bite if you only have limited time available! if you don't land on fish and have a good reason to stay on that spot get up and move!

3. Just because you hammered them here last week, last year or last night don't let your self become complacent thinking that the bite will be the same or the baits you use will be the same or even the colors!

4. The fish move every day, not just location but depths in the water column even over the day so be ready to adapt!

5. Yesterdays colors should be left with yesterdays fish. Just because blah blah blah color produced well yesterday does not mean its going to work today.

So lets talk a little more in depth on those 5 points,

Making a plan, Things I look at before I head out for the morning is the weather and wind. I want to know is it cloudy? Raining? Calm or cranking wind.

If its a flat calm and sunny I am going to be looking for those fish to be a bit lower in the water column or slightly deeper on a given piece of structure. cloudy windy days ill be expecting those fish higher in the water column. Walleyes are not always pinned down tight to the bottom. I found fish down 4-6 feet over 12-16 feet of water this last weekend that i was never marking on my sonars. I just assumed that I should have 1 or 2 baits up higher in the water column due to some cloudy rough water that would bring those fish up higher. So even though yesterday I was catching fish 1 foot off bottom I Started the trip[ off with 2 baits up high only down 4 and 5 feet. Once the first 3 fish hit the deck I adjusted my spread of baits to target 5-8 feet down and boom we were on our way to a limit with doubles and triples. But if I just threw my baits out to the same depth I was at the day before I would of been fishing under those fish! Don't rely on yesterdays information. Worry about figuring out today!

The colors changed from day to day as well. I had one color a very bright yellow and lime green that produced 60% of our bites on day 1 only produce 2 bites on day 2. Instead it turned to a dark black bait that never got a sniff on day 1 out there.

Point is when i went out the next morning i started with a new mix of colors out there at the depths I thought would produce and our first bite was on a black base bait. I then put another all black bait out at a different depth and that went off right away. So instead of assuming the color had to be all black... I looked through my boxes and picked out 3 other colors but the thing they shared in common was that they all were a darker color theme.

Boom all 6 rods were producing just as many fish as each other and we were getting 2-3-4-5 on at a time! Even had all 6 go off one after the other!

How to pick the right color.

I feel like this should be an article in its own but ill summarize my thoughts and feelings on bait color.

I pick my colors by what the fish tell me they want. Period. I do not follow any rules of day or night or cloud or clear. I flat out try a mix of everything as quickly as I can until I find out what they want that day. The way I go about doing this is fairly simple as long as you can get the thought out of your head that every detail on a crank bait matters. I can not stress this enough, coming from a custom painter for the last 6 years and selling thousands of baits to customers all over the country believe me I have tried many many different color combos and stripe patterns or dots..... It all comes down to the overall theme of the bait.

I put them into 4 categories.

1. Bright

2. Dark

3. Clear

4. Chrome

Bright colors are just that. Loud Flashy florescent bright colored baits that catch your attention. Lime green, Yellow, Pink, Chartreuse.

Dark Is your Blacks, Greys, Reds, Some Blues, Purples

Now is the bait painted over a solid opaque or chrome base? that makes a difference. If its flashy or subtle or see through with some flash tape inside.

Sit down and take stock in your baits and put them into those 4 categories on your next trip out once you start catching fish on those baits and you want to more out that match or are similar start digging from baits of the same category. Don't get hung up on matching the exact pattern. Just get close! you'll find other similar colors even if they are different colors but same category will produce just as well.

Lastly ill touch on depth of baits and distance back behind the board.

Start off with a mix but quickly narrow down your depth.

Depth of my bait is something I place highly in my scope of catching fish and I'm not afraid to run all 6 baits at the same depth or with in a foot of each other.

Day one I started with flicker shads at 6 different depths 4-5-7-8-9-11 I recall is where I started out at but after the first 30 min of that morning I was at 10 and 11 for all 6 baits. Start out with a good spread and narrow it down. First fish came at 11? Move 2 more baits to 11 and see if the next couple bites come at that depth if they do CHANG IT ALL TO 11! or close to it.

Why leave baits at a depth that are not producing or producing less bites? Don't even if i caught 3 fish at 5 down but I caught 10 at 11 down in the last hour I'm moving that 5 down to 11. Just because some fish are in a different depth does not mean all of them are. or the majority are. give your baits the best odds possible. That's like saying ill work here for 10 $ per hour even though over here I can do the identical job and make 3x as much per hour... What are you going to do? Ride it out with 3 fish per hour or try and up your odds and get 10 per hour? At some point this weekend we were at a rate of 25+ fish per hour but in order to do that i had to have all of my baits at the right working depth with the right color theme and boom magic happened.

On your next green bay walleye trip try to put some of this to use and i hope it will help you to create your next great memory!!

Tight Lines !!!!