Willard Wednesday and Thursday

[Paddler]

One of my granddaughters has been asking me to take her fishing for awhile now, so we went out Wednesday.  I troll cranks behind boards, and initially put out deeper running stuff except for my old reliable SR5 in black/silver.  Earlier reports made it sound like the fish were deeper, but our first fish came on the SR5.  So we ended up running SR5s and SR7s.  We had ~15 fish to the boat and released the under 17" fish for the most part.  I figure those 15" fish will be 18" or so in a year, and there's not much meat on the small fish anyway.  We also caught a nice perch down about 15' on a Wally Diver.  We met Shawn at the cleaning station, nice to meet another member.




Yesterday I took my buddy up, what a difference a day makes.  We fished the same area with what we caught them on the day before but struggled.  I tried a Thin Fin at 6' down, a Reef Runner at 21",and everything in between without success.  Then after switching to a 1/5 ounce Hot N Tot in chartreuse and silver, I had a hit almost immediately.  The fish were a better grade, multiple were 19-20".  Again we released as many as we kept.  We did manage a 24", 5.5# (by my spring scale) wiper, certainly a PR.




We made fish tacos tonight with the wiper, walleye in tempura batter last night.  A couple of nice days on the water.