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| Pete with a nice one! |
When I saw the weather forecast for Thursday this week, I knew I had to get out to Traverse Bay for some greenback walleye. Word on the street had anglers heading up from as far away as South Dakota to get in on a late season bite. Friend Pete Hiebert and I arrived at the boat launch just after 8:30 in the morning and there were already a number of boats launched. As we had driven up that morning the wind was gusting from the northwest, the worst possible direction for Traverse Bay. Once on the river though, the wind had already diminished, the forecast were for light winds until evening. So away we went, arriving ten minutes later at the mouth of the river as it enters Lake Winnipeg. This was my first trip to Pine Falls and area this year but I have been fishing the system for close to 40 years. A friend of mine had indicated that the majority of the walleye were being caught in about 12-14 feet of water along the main river channel as it heads out in the bay. Slowly driving the boat out through the mouth we started to notice a marked difference in water clarity the further out in the bay we went. I told Pete we needed to head back to clearer water to check out if we could mark some fish. Sure enough has we headed a bit back south, we started to mark large schools of baitfish in 15 feet of water. There was only one other boat in this year area and while they were catching fish nonstop, they were all small, less than eighteen inches from what we could tell. We had anchored about 400 yards from them on a little extended point on the side flat of the channel. In no time we started to catch fish after fish, the largest a chunky 28 incher
that Pete brought to the boat. I had caught two red zone fish early and that continued on for the next couple of hours. Pete also lost two really good fish, stubborn headshaking walleye that managed to shake the hook. We were both vertical jigging with nice salted shiners from Nate’s Baits.
It sure made a difference in our size of fish caught. We were using large to extra large salted shiners and these big fish were just hammering them.
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| Now this is fun! |
As is usually the case activity level changed during the day. By eleven o’clock we were still catching fish but I landed eight in a row using the rod holder. All the bites in this time frame were non existant. You knew you had a fish on when the rod tip didn’t come back up after as dip with the wave action. Around one o’clock that bite changed again and Pete started catching them on a bit heavier jig with an aggressive lift and drop. I don’t know about you but I love catching walleye this way and it turned out to be a great day on the water!
1 Comment
Nice fish Councillor Pete!