Chill Fishing Report

Cody Hill

The leaves are changing, docks and lifts are starting to come out of the water and cab-ins are being closed for the season. 

With our cooler night temps, we’ve seen the water temperatures start to drop very quickly. This weekend was a fun one, but you had to work hard to keep on fish but when they bit it equaled quality fish.

Minnow bite was our golden ticket, but presentations had to vary depending on what you wanted to target and that has been a change from the past few weeks.  If we pulled a Lindy Rig with a Creek Chub or Sucker minnow, we couldn’t keep the small mouth bass off our lines but if we used a jig and the same minnow it produced all our walleyes and only a few random bass. 

I always stress attention to detail and once you find a pattern it can make it easier find-ing active fish.  All our small mouth were all between the 23- and 24-foot depth contour lines on my Lake Master Map.  This was very unique because sometimes we were tight to weeds and other times, we were more than 50 feet away from them.  After we caught onto that presentation it produced a lot of fish throughout the area we fished.  A simple Lindy Rig with a medium sized minnow produced amazing.  If you are on a good small mouth bite watch carefully as you reel in a fish because sometimes others will follow the fish up and that happened to us a few times and it allowed us to get doubles by dropping your line a few feet below the boat and letting your minnow swim around.

Walleyes on the other hand were very deep first thing in the morning but in the middle of the day and afternoon they were up in that 14-17 feet of water in large schools.  Our biggest walleyes came from deeper water roaming flats but with the clear water the fish found us instead of us chasing them.  This presentation worked till mid-day when our schools that had been under us for hours disappeared without a trace.  We found fish in shallower water roaming flats with deep water adjacent.  The fish were very curious but not necessarily aggressive.  Livescope showed almost every cast having 2-3-4-5 fish looking at our lures as we would cast over the flat but rarely did one of the fish following the lure bite.  Almost all our bites came off a fish coming in from a distance away and attacking it instantly instead of the fish following our jigs.  I wish we would have had smaller minnows for this presentation because the smaller the minnow the quicker the bite occurred.

There is still time to get out and enjoy fall! Fall fishing is one of my favorite times of the year to fish! 

It is never too early to start thinking about booking ice fishing trips! I’d love to get some-thing in the books! Contact us today!