Trolling the new Weedline for just about anything that swims.

Much to my surprise, walleyes were still to be found in feeder rivers in mid-June. The water temp on Friday was 70 and it went up to 74 by Sunday night. The weekend of the 17th and 18th of June was the warmest of 2006 so far and cottagers remembered they had boats and sea-doos. I hate this part of the year. I wish it could be April all year on the lake.
Here’s where things get interesting. Pat and I headed out to the main lake only to find that wind was severely challenging boat control once again. We really didn’t feel like doing the live bait rig thing in channel edges pounded by a 25 km/h wind so we reluctantly decided to head out to a small river to try and bring up a few smallies. We did what we do in May, that is, troll floating rapalas on fireline. I truly believe the fireline and quality rods are crucial for this type of fishing. These lures are fine tuned and even the smallest amount of weed will stop them from working. Without the feel you get from Fireline and a good rod there’s no way you could detect these smaller pieces of grass.
We got passed a marina. The OPP were having a community picnic of some kind. Take a kid fishing day or something. There were seadoos, boats, water-skiers and other spoilers all over the place. We hesitated…but decided that since we were here we may as well start trolling and try to keep our lures away from other boats. We trolled for no longer than about 2 minutes, and while watching a group of about 10 sea-doos go right by us I hear Pat say the magic words : “fish on!”.
He said the fish had some weight and wanted to stay down. He said he felt a headshake so we both looked at each other and thought ; Could it be? Sure enough, I saw the white tip under the fin as the fish saw the boat and desperately tried to head back to the 20 foot hole it came out of. A minute later, we had this 4 pound 9 ounce walleye in the boat, much to the delight of our sea-doo onlookers, and of Mr. Dubeau and his guide of course.

We kept the pattern going all weekend. Turns out we caught about 5 walleyes, a few smallmouth, a perch and a bonus 7.5 pound pike in the warmer main-lake tributary. I learned something this weekend. I should definitely go bass fishing in feeder rivers more often, too windy on the big lake or not.

Jigger.