Shad raps were among the first lures I was introduced to when I started walleye fishing. I had a buddy in college who’s brother loved to fish. He showed up one weekend in September with his boat and decided to fish the local lake. He picked a popular mid-lake flat and started pulling a little #5 deep diving shad rap in about 12 feet. Over the course of the evening we boated some large walleyes. This experience started a long love for this little balsa lure. Sometimes I depend on it too much, but more often than not… when the going gets tough, pulling out this crankbait in the evening has put more than one nice walleye in the live well.

Some things we need to know about walleyes:

1. Walleye have very light sensitive eyes.
They are therefore known to avoid very direct sunlight. You sometimes hear the term “walleye chop”. Fishermen often consider windy days an advantage because the wind produces a chop on the water that cuts down on the amount of sunlight, thus increasing the chances that walleyes will become active in shallower areas. For this same reason, evening fishing is an absolute prime time to catch walleyes in shallow areas. In low-light conditions walleyes can use their eyesight advantage to catch prey. Eating… a very important criteria for walleye survival .

2. There are almost always walleyes in shallow areas.
This is a personal opinion shared by many. On the same lake that you find fishermen catching walleyes deep, you may also find fishermen catching walleyes shallow. Never neglect to look for walleyes in prime shallow areas. This should generally be an area with weed cover that holds baitfish.

3. Walleyes generally relate to some kind of structure.
This is one of the basic tenets of pretty much any kind of fishing. Structure holds baitfish and therefore it holds the larger game fish. Structure means humps, points, weed beds, and even large flats.

Given these basic premises, you can formulate some options for when to pull out the crankbaits. The thing I like about pulling crankbaits is that you can cover a ton of water in search of walleyes over a relatively short period of time. I’ve speculated several nights that if we just pulled a couple of crankbaits around the perimeter of a walleye lake during the evening we would probably eventually pick up a walleye or two. This attitude has often gotten us the one lousy fish we caught during an evening. The one likely time to avoid cranks is during calm sunny days. If you have a sunny day but some decent wind, give it a shot on the side taking the pounding from the wind. Look for spots that naturally attract fish… weed beds (cabbage is great), and sharp transitions from deeper to shallow water where baitfish can get trapped against the break.

We started at about 5:30 one evening on a lake we literally had never fished before. This was a league night, so we were feeling a little pressure. There was a decent breeze, so we gravitated toward the side of the lake taking the wind. We marked some fish in deeper water so we tied up a couple of Lindy rigs and started working the break. There were definitely fish down there but we got no action. For some reason we both had zero patience that evening and said “to heck with it”. We clipped the rigs, tied on a couple of #5 Shad Raps and started working the shore. In about 5 minutes we came around a sharp point, worked the inside turn at about 6 feet and my son hammered our first walleye. We continued on about another 100 yards and he nailed another one. For the next half hour we worked the same 100 yard stretch in literally 4 or 5 feet of water and managed to boat 7 very nice walleyes, including those two fat ones in the picture. We also caught a pile of northerns. The wind was perfect, the sky was overcast and we were very lucky. When we got back to the landing we weighed in and discovered that we had come in second. Guess what the other guys were doing… yeah… pulling crankbaits over a shallow gravel bar at the other end. They beat us by one big fish. Everyone else was griping about how they were marking fish deep but couldn’t get a darn thing to bite.

During the evening, walleyes often naturally move from deeper water to shallow water to take advantage of their excellent eyesight and prowl for prey. Likely fishing spots include mid-lake flats or other areas that transition from deep to shallow. The tops of these types of structure can be great at night or during windy, overcast days.

What to Use:

The vast majority of my crankbait collection is comprised of Rapala Shad Raps… mostly #5, but with several #7. I mix the colors making sure I buy matching colors in both the deep and shallow running variety. The shallow-runners have a short angled lip that keeps the bait running shallow enough to avoid weeds but keeps the bait close to the fish. The deep-runners have a fat lip that pulls the bait even deeper. Which one to use depends completely upon the conditions and depths. If I am fishing on a flat at night that gets to 10 – 12 feet, I will usually pull a deep-runner. If I can occasionally feel the bait hitting the weeds I know I’m good. When I get less than 8 feet I will go to the shallow-runner. I also keep larger baits in various configurations to get the bait even deeper if the fish are hanging off the edges. I always tie the lure directly to the line. Some fishermen I know use “Rap-snaps” to make it easy to change between different colors and sizes. I hate to add any potential point of failure to the rig. We generally pull them anywhere between 1.5 and 2 mph… and at least 50 feet behind the boat. We generally do not fish in waters where planer boards are a reasonable option, but many fisherman will use planer boards to get the lures way out away from the boat and the noise. This is probably better suited to situations where you can pull the bait in one direction for longer stretches.

For more tactics, please visit my Walleye Fishing Blog.

*Note: Another great article from WalleyeGuy. Don’t forget to visit the blog.

                          

Despite our ability to improvise, knowing what I know now about fishing with decent equipment I can tell you that fishing is much more fun, and much easier with the right tools. You really need to have some sort of electronics to tell you how far the bottom of the lake is beneath your boat. Anybody who does a great deal of fishing should really invest in some sort of sonar. The word “sonar” is an abbreviation for “SOund, NAvigation and Ranging.” It was developed during World War II to track enemy submarines. A sonar consists of a transmitter, transducer, receiver and display.

Fishing sonar units transmit an electrical impulse that is converted into a sound wave by the transducer and sent into the water. This wave strikes an object and rebounds, the echo hit the transducer, which converts it back into an electric signal, which is interpreted by the receiver and sent to the display. Sound travels in water at a constant speed of 4800 feet per second. Knowing this, the time between the transmitted signal and the received echo can be measured and the distance to the object determined. This process repeats several times each second.

In practical terms, the display of most fishing sonar will consist of a liquid crystal display something like the following:

On most units the screen scrolls by to give you a series of readings as the signals bounce off the lake bottom. This is from the Lowrance 334c. Even the least expensive units will have a similar display, although most at the lower-end will be black and white. The scale on the side gives you the depth reading. The solid line at 50 is the lake bottom. The little “hooks” you see above that line represent fish. Sonar gives you an instantaneous reading so you have a constant stream of information flowing to the unit. If you are cruising along the shoreline or along a point, you can watch your sonar to locate sharp drops or humps below the surface. In addition, most fisherman will use the sonar to determine whether or not there are any fish hanging around. If they don’t see those tell-tale hooks, they generally won’t waste any time tossing a bait in the water. Pretty tough to catch what isn’t there!

As if this innovation weren’t enough, we are now in the era of the combined technologies of sonar and GPS. Many of you have a Garmin or some other such navigation device in your car. Well, imagine how nice it would be if you had a detailed contour map of the lake you were fishing right on your depth-finder. Well, I’m pleased to tell you that this technology has been available for quite some time now. The image to the left is a typical image produced on modern fishing electronics. Units that include GPS features typically have a slot to accept an SD memory card produced by companies like LakeMaster or Navionics. These companies spend hours mapping popular lakes and then produce high quality maps like the one to the left. The best of these maps include very detailed countours as fine a three feet. Combined with global positioning, your boat’s position is overlayed on this map (which you can zoom in or our for more or less precision) allowing you to have a visual representation of your position on the lake relative to the physical features you see on the map. It used to take me a good 10 minutes buzzing back and forth to locate a mid-lake rock pile on my favorite local lake. And even then I might not have been exactly sure which end I was at. With the LakeMaster chip in my Lowrance I just leave the landing and head right to the rockpile. Guesswork gone. As with all things electronic, prices range from reasonable to ridiculous. You can expect to shell out $600-$700 for a color sonar/gps unit with a 5″ screen. Way more if you go for the bigger screen.

The bottom line is that the walleye fisherman’s arsenal really needs to include some form of sonar. A basic unit that gives you depth and fish marking will suffice for most anglers. A unit that can give you the depth and will mark fish below the boat accomplishes two very basic principles of successful fishing… locating structure, and locating fish. If there are no fish below your boat, there isn’t much point in dropping a line down there!

For more information and stories, please visit my Walleye Fishing Blog.

*Note: AnglerWise user walleyeguy contributed this great article. Let’s say thanks by visiting his blog.