July 31 Fishing Report

July 31, 2012 Fishing report

Hi folks.

A lot has happened since my last report. Since that long stretch of hot weather that we started the month with, we have seen a lot of new fronts come through the past couple of weeks. The weather patterns have shown some up and down movement with two-three days of cold fronts (75 to 80, so not too dramatic) followed by two-three days of really hot weather, and so on. The fishing has followed this pattern also. Fish seem to really like the hot weather. We’ve seen our best bites taking place when life is uncomfortable on the water, especially when it comes to smallmouth bass. The walleyes have been ok early morning and late evenings, right at sundown. The cooler weather seems to be better for the walleyes. Water temps right now are starting the day out at about 77 and warming up to about 80. If we continue to cool these water temps down a little, we should see a great bite start. Personally, I would like to see 72 to 74 degrees.

When heading out in the upcoming week, you should find some decent fishing activity. It’s been a very good multi-species bite as of late. We head out targeting walleyes and we generally get them. But along the way we sure have been having fun with smallmouth bass and jumbo perch with a few northerns sprinkled in. It is completely a crawler bite right now. These have been far out-producing all other types of bait. Fish have NOT been aggressive, so very slow retrieves to almost dead sticking is the order of the day for presentation. Once you detect a hit, give that fish a good 15 to 20 seconds before setting the hook.

When it comes to walleye fishing – weeds remain the key. Fish are preferring weeds above all other types of structures when available. On lakes with some color to the water, we’ve been fishing between 6 and 8 feet. If it’s clear water, you want to drop down to the deepest weed edges – 15 to 18 feet seems to be a pretty good depth to find them in.

Smallmouth bass have been hanging around gravel and timber. These fish have just been gorging on crawdads. We’ve had real good success for fishing smallmouth by just dropping a line over the side by timber piles – doing what I call the smallmouth drop, just using a jig-and-nightcrawler. Plastics have also been pretty effective on these fish. Slurpies and wacky worms have been some effective plastics to try. I’ve also found some very good success on the Manitowish Chain using deep diving cranks. We’ve been cranking ‘em down, and stopping, and these bass just can’t seem to lay off of this.

Good luck fishing.