July 28 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 followed by two-three days of 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. The cold fronts tend to slow things down dramatically. 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. Some days it’s even longer than that.

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.

Muskie fishing has also been decent as of late. It’s been particularly good as the weather changes hit us. Those moments leading up to a storm have been very good. We’ve been locating fish in deep weed edges and with water temps hovering in the high 70’s, topwater has become very effective during the early morning and late afternoon hours.

Two lures that I’ve been having very good luck with have been the mepps H210 and a perch colored Suick. We seem to have an abundance of perch around on many lakes and these fish are zeroing in on them. They are also being found hanging around areas where the crappies are holding. All-in-all look for the next week to hold some decent fishing for anglers, and now that August is arriving we should start seeing more of the natural lakes begin to put on their summer bite.

Good luck fishing.
Jeff Winters