Northwest Fishing Reports

After my recent trip to banks lake and getting into some smaller walleye I've began to research more about walleye and their behavior along with fishing.

From my recent trip I always fished any time from dawn to dusk. I've found some anglers saying that walleye are much more active at night and tend to either go shallow or "float" to surface to feed.

So I hope there are anglers who have gone targeting walleye at night and day to pitch in their experiments for us to annotate.

About 25 years ago before I got the Pike bug, I fished primarily for walleye. During the summer months we would fish all day then when it got dark we would move in and cast at the shoreline. Of course it didn't always work but there were many times we would catch more fish after dark than we had all day.

Here is the deal with night fishing for walleye it "can" produce great results. But just going out at night isn't the answer. Its no different than fishing during the day if the conditions are not right the results will suffer. Pay close attention to moon phases and peak feeding times. Check weather forecasts. Put all that together and do some recon by going out and checking areas that could potentially hold fish and you have a recipe for success. That holds true with day time fishing. The misconception is that walleye primarily feed at night but from first hand experience that isn't always true. On a body of water such as Banks the fish tend to hold on deeper breaks and structure so the light levels have less effect on them as opposed to Moses. I have had a lot of success fishing Moses at night but it took quite a bit of searching to find areas when the time was right to produce. Also if your having issues catching bigger fish and all you can find is smaller ones there are a couple things you can do. Walleye tend to run in packs so if all you get are 12-15" in lets say 15-20' of water move to another area look for the bigger arcs on your sonar. Try going deeper, once you locate on decent fish concentrate on that depth, more will likely be there. Also upsize the lures you are using, it doesn't always work but big lures usually produce bigger fish. You may not get 50 fish but the 5 you get will be decent ones. Something I like to do is use a normal size lure on one pole then put something large on the other. That way you can still stay busy catching fish but when that other lure gets hit its game on. Hope this helps.