Can you believe we are coming up on 4th of July, already! This last month was a ton of fun and if you made it out on the lake, you were rewarded for it.
Beginning of June we had temperatures well above average that pushed the water temperatures up in a hurry. Those rising temps got the fish active and virtually any tactic thrown at them was getting fish in the boat. The last couple weeks though, we have seen a dip in daytime/night time temps which has stabilized or even cooled the water. Heck, we even saw rain a couple of these days-holy cow was that needed. Those days have done some interesting things to the bite.
Typically, a rain shower doesn’t do much to shut down the bite on DL. This year, that’s a different story. The walleyes are still relating to the areas we found them the day before, but seem to be a much tougher bite. Yes, you can scratch out a limit or two, but it might take a couple/three hours, instead of 20-40 minutes.
Tactics: Right now we are finding fish in 8-21 ft of water. We typically start the search in the 12-14 ft this time of year and work +- of that depth. Right now, a spinner bite is hard to beat but there are many ways to catch fish this time of year. For example, the other day we were pulling spinners on an old riprap shoreline and you literally had 10+ fish on the graph at a time. You couldn’t buy a fish so we tried spot-locking and slip bobbers. Game on. We couldn’t keep a bobber up and filled out in minutes. Moral of the story, trust your graph, if there is fish there, try switching up tactics to put more in the boat.
Another fun way to fish right now is slip bobbering in the trees. I like to use the livescope and find pods of walleyes in the trees and hop tree to tree going after them. Many times these are very nice fish too.
That’s all for now! I’ll be out of the area next week but will be getting out with clients again the week of July 10th!
Happy 4th of July!
Varilek's Guide Service 