South Lake Leelanau - 7/5 and 7/9

We headed up for our annual trip to the Leland area and this year the girls wanted to add a new species, walleye. I don’t have much experience on the South Lake other than one bass tournament during the spawn. But from any research I’ve done it seems like the place to go for walleyes in the area. Lot’s of fish but the not much size which would be just fine with us if we were just trying to catch a walleye.

We were going early to avoid the boat traffic and all the kids were in. I gave Mabel the option of going to another lake that was a sure thing smallmouth bite or trying something new that we might totally fail at. She went with something new and we were off. A buddy had told me that scoping with a jighead an a crawler was the hot thing in the walleye world. So that is what we were prepared to do. I had some tungsten jigheads with a wire keeper from BKK that would be perfect for this. Crawlers are just dirty btw and I got really sick of the live bait thing. We headed to a point off the deep basin to try our luck first. It didn’t take long to get our first walleye but there really wasn’t a ton around. Interestingly enough the kids were fighting one and a boat wheeled right in on us. I wasn’t loving this area and we kept moving eventually needing to make a switch.

I have literally never fished summertime walleyes but I’ve heard deep flats can be good. Humminbird’s Lakemaster mapping made it easy to find one. Depth shading is such a nice feature with those maps and a big green flat stuck out like a sore thumb (we fished anywhere from 15 to almost 30 feet). Off we went and instantly found a bunch more fish. Wouldn’t you know it and while the were fighting another fish, the same boat now trolling. Hurried to pull their lines and get right in on us. It’s not a good look when 5 kids start independently chuckling about these guys following us around and not catching anything. It was honestly pretty annoying as they kept us from moving around freely and would sometimes go spot lock where we had just caught some. The kids were having a great time and we were catching fish though and they’d all gotten their first walleyes. We did however struggle with keepers, plenty that were just short but only 3 over 15 inches on this quick trip. The birthday girl was very sour about not getting a keeper. We did lose one that seemed to be significantly bigger and it came out of one of the bigger schools we had found out there. We all had a good time making Ethan feel guilty for losing that one!

Those fish were delicious and it was pretty fun so we went back one more time. I tried refining my presentation a little bit with different jighead weights. I started with 1/8 ounce instead of a quarter this time but ended up settling on a 3/16 for castability with just half a crawler on. This was a midday trip and things were a little different. We got distracted by some fish up in the water column. I could tell with MEGA Live 2 they were something different and not what we wanted. But they were aggressive and would bite, I just couldn’t hook them. We finally figured it out, they were all gar. I was surprised we hadn’t seen any smallmouth on the first trip but we found one this time. It was a MAGNUM for sure over 5 and maybe bigger. Unfortunately I had the drag pretty tight for those walleyes and a beat up 7 pound leader from a bass trip with the kids a couple days before. A drag peeling run under the boat was too much and she was gone. We got some walleyes and headed back home with some more fish for the fryer. Plus lots of ideas for next year. A couple ideas I have right off the get go are being prepared with some slip bobber rigs for those big schools. Another is a adding a stinger hook, we would have more than double our catch with one of those. Those walleyes were experts at biting off a chunk of crawler or not hooking up. There are probably some artificial lures that are better at triggering bigger fish too. Some more areas would be beneficial too as I’m sure there are places that hold a much larger percentage of keepers. I’ll take the success we had for knowing nothing, little time, and a boatload of kids. I won’t be back this year but I’ll be prepared for next July.