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.

It was great chatting with you, it definitely was more of a grind Thursday, just curious did you guys get most of your during the 2 hours of Walleye chop between 9-11am on Thursday?

Nope, we got all but one when we switched to the small Hot N Tot.  Wind and chop didn't matter.  After I caught a few my buddy switched to to the Hot N Tot, too, so we were running all 4 rods with them.  They vibrate a lot faster than SRs, I think that's the difference.

I bought them many years ago, as in well before I bought my current boat in 2005.  I think it was probably about the same time I bought my copy of "Precision Trolling", which is copywrite 1997.  I bought it from Angler's Inn in Sugarhouse, and they went out of business in 2003.  Interesting that mine aren't marked Hot N Tot, and don't have the metal clasp like those pictured in the book or on their website.  The book lists them at 1/4 ounce, not 1/5.  I was thinking about the Thin Fins.