You Could Learn a lot from a Walleye

Another big line of thunderstorms rolled through Friday night and Saturday morning. Locally we received between 2-3 inches of rain in a short amount of time. This was enough to jump the water level in the local reservoir to the point of an idle only restriction. When things finally cleared after lunch Saturday I loaded the boat and headed out, hoping to get some fishing in before the next line of storms made it over. When the water makes a nice jump, it is not unusual to get a good group of fish push shallow into the newly flooded cover. In this case we were only talking a 12"-18" rise, but that is still rather significant on this particular body of water. How fast bass react and move to these changes varies from water to water.

I was planning on whacking some nice bass flipping jigs to newly flooded shorelines. That turned out not to be the case this time. Instead, I found fish still holding out slightly from the bank, not right up in the heavy cover. I was able to run a shallow crank around a catch several fish up to 3 pounds, but it was fairly slower than expected. After a bit I figured I'd try something different. Out came the walleye gear.

While I actually spend about 90% of my time on the water chasing bass, I probably only spend about 50% of my time studying bass. The other 50% is spent studying other fish and fishery related issues. I'm a big believer in understanding as much as I can about fish and how to catch them - all fish. As a tournament angler I always felt there were little "secrets", presentations or adaptations I could make to my bass fishing based upon how the pros and experts fish for other fish. These would be things that my competition most likely never picked up on because they were always focused on bass. A lot of this type information came from studying walleye sticks.

I had been graphing the lake as I moved around from area to area and seeing lots of fish stacked up in 8'-12' of water. These were larger arches of what were most likely either bass or eyes in this lake. So I grabbed a rod and set it up for trolling and started making passes out in this depth range. It didn't take too long until I figured out some of what I had been marking. Walleyes.

There are numerous cross over applications between walleyes and bass. Graph reading is a biggie which I already mentioned. Boat control is another, learning how to stay on contours. Trolling is also a very effective technique for covering water. While it is illegal during tournaments, it is perfectly valid as a search method in practice. This never registers on most bass anglers minds. Walleye trollers are pretty fanatical about their trolling setups. They've gone to great lengths to completely understand exactly how deep their baits run in all scenarios; different baits, different weight lines, different length lines, trolling versus casting, etc.. They have probably researched and spent more time learning this stuff than most any bass angler alive. And a lot of this information is available for public consumption.

If you love throwing cranks, you're really missing the boat if you haven't spent some time studying walleye. Mike McClelland started the whole thing off years ago (~1989) with the publication of the book "Crankbaits: A Guide to Casting & Trolling Depths of 200 Popular Lures". I have one of these original guides and believe me, it has a lot of bass crankbaits in it. The concept was expanded and became incredibly comprehensive when Mark Romanack ran with the idea and published the book Precision Trolling. Click on the link to learn a little more about how the whole thing came about. Even Rapala created their own "Tackle Box Guide" based on the Precision Trolling data for all their lures. I've included a little snippet in the picture box to the left of what type information you can get for bass lures, in this case a Bandit 100. But trust me, this little table barely scratches the surface of what is covered in the book.

Comments

[Rich Ziert]

Very good comments Brian. I grew up fishing Eyes and Northerns, and can tell anyone from a bass viewpoint, there are none so blind as those that will not see. There are so very many crossover bits of info that both tie species together and separates them. In particular, the predator/prey relationship of any lake, and preferred water temps tell us who's top dog and where to find the best spots for what we are after.

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