My wife and I have just returned from our final trip to Lake Vermilion for 2008. Normally we go thru 40-50 dozen nitecrawlers during our annual August trip. This year things started out a bit slower than normal with short hits being the soup du jour. On day three of our trip, I purchased 3 dozen leeches and never looked back. I have never seen walleyes hit leeches in August like they did for us this year. We never used another crawler and I purchased an additional 2#'s of leeches. As usual, we fished from around 7:30AM until ~1:00PM. Our worst day was 6 walleyes(first day) and our best was 25. We normally caught 15-20 walleyes every day. The unreal thing was the size Most days, our catch was made up of 50% slot fish! On one day, my wife got a 29"(our biggest),26", and 3 others 20-24". We found the 15-17" the most difficult to locate. I don't want to start waving red flags but I sure hope that segment of the population is doing as well as the slot fish. It seems that whenever you get knowlegeable fishermen targeting a specific age class, the population can be affected. Personally, I enjoy catching the 17" and up walleyes and am a strong supporter of the slot(now). In addition to the walleyes, we caught several smallmouth bass. We found the bass in the same areas the walleyes were. Several of our bass measured 18-20" with our best measuring 22". We found our fish on top of the reefs early in our trip in 17-22' of water. A few days ago, when the cloudy rainy stuff hit, they seemed to move off into 25-28'. Our standard spring rig worked best: #8 red hook(sometimes #10 depending on the snag situation), 3-4'10# Maxima leader, 1 oz bottom bouncer. I would give two suggestions for those seeking information: first, most of the time when fishing very rocky snaggy reefs, the snags are "hook snags" and switching to a small hook size can help alleviate the constant snagging; second, I use a method I call "rig jigging". Basically, if you know the fish are there, I use the rig described above and go very slowly constantly bouncing the end of the rod tip. At times, this method has caught lots of fish when simply dragging the rig was ineffective.
Good luck to all of you who still have some fishing left for this year and we'll look forward to being back next spring.

Great report Barney,
Glad to see you guys had a good time and put together a pattern. Were you using spinners on your bouncers. A little suprised to see the smallies mixed in with the walleys, has that happened before. Once again thanks for the indepth report.
CJ

CJ:
The rig uses a plain red Gamakatsu hook tied to the leader. No frills, spinners, etc. I sometimes put a colored(usually red) bead or two in front of the hook but not this time. I have found that when August rolls around, some of the nicest smallmouth we catch all year comes from the deep water humps. They are right there with the walleyes and, actually, the hit is sometimes hard to distinguish from a walleye. The big difference that I noticed is that the walleyes regurgitate perch minnows and the smallmouth were regurgitating crawfish. Big Bay has lots of humps that are loaded with both species of fish. Take an afternoon and go exploring with your sonar. Start with water 30' or deeper and look for the hump. You'll be amazed what you might find and will probably have a spot all to yourself. Good Luck

I fish the east end just like barney does and in the same types of structure this time of year, though my leaders are longer (about 6') and maybe that's why most of my snags are bottom bouncer snags, not hook snags. Sometimes I can pop them loose but other times have to back up to reverse the angle to pop them loose.

By late summer it's not at all uncommon to find the smallies in the same deep structure as the 'eyes, and by September and through fall it seems in some places to be about 50-50 'eyes and smallies.

Thanks guys I'll give that rig a try.

CJ

Barney,
What exactly is a spring rig? I'm pretty new to the walleye game but will be up in the Babbitt area for Labor Day and looking to fish Vermillion at least one day. Do you think I will have any luck with a similar presentation. Also what weight of bottom bouncer or does it depend on the wind and speed? Any help from you or anybody would be greatly appreciated trying to help my girlfriend boat some walleyes which will mean more time on the water for me.

Thanks in Advance

Thompsonz28:
Spring fishing normally means colder water and super slow presentation. Spinners, etc. usually aren't nearly as effective as a plain hook with live bait slow trolled. Summer fishing means more active fish with warmer water willing to chase bait, such as perch minnows occuring naturally. Flashy spinners can be deadly during this time.
During our most recent trip, I found the "spring" presentation more effective for whatever reason. Slow trolled leeches on a plain red size 8 or 10 hook with a 3-4 ft mono leader did the trick. Bottom bouncers were one ounce, but I use that size for most of my rig fishing no matter the depth. Some fishermen recommend 1oz for every 10' of depth. The reason is to fish pretty much straight down and "bottom bounce" the weight. I fish slow enough to keep contact with the bottom with my 1oz weight no matter what depth.
I would think that this rig would work very well during the time period when you will be there.
Good luck.

Great post Barney. I'm on the West end around Niles Bay and don't catch the number on 'eyes as you East-enders do. I'm not complaining and it's nice to compare techniques. I'm wondering what your technique is for boat control especially when the wind comes up? I have a bow mounted trolling motor and have no problem with a light wind but when the wind comes up I hate having to spend so much thought fighting the wind so I usually anchor. Wish I had a tiller mount boat at these times. One other thing is I fish in the evening and get a few, usually at dusk. I just can't seem to get going in the AM. I'm wondering how your catch rate is in the early Am time to say 11 AM or 1 PM?

Thanks for the tips about using a small hook to avoid snags with no spinner- I think that makes allot of sense.

StillFishin'

Barney, I'm glad you had great fishing trip. We fished the east side of Lake Vermilion Saturday afternoon August 16th thru Monday morning. The areas fished with a west wind included small reefs south and east of Comet Island, north side of Patatoe, Taylor, and Stonich Island, deep hole and reef east of Stonich Island. We tried bottom bounce with leeches and crawlers as Barney described with no success. Also tried trolling with reef runners and leadcore with shad raps. On Sunday during the day we saw two fish netted near Potatoe Island. None on Saturday. I'm interested to know what was working during this time frame.

StillFishin':
I use a tiller trolling motor and when the wind becomes a problem, I usually do a couple of different things. Boat control=speed and that usually determines the success or failure when catching fish. First of all, I drift and try to control drift speed by either using the trolling motor or the big motor to slow things down a bit if needed. If that isn't working(and lack of strikes let's me know) I will try to backtroll quartering into the waves. The speed is always the key and if too much wind persists, I opt for another day.
The morning hours from around 7:30 AM to 1:00PM is when we do almost all of our fishing.

GONE CATCH'N:
The areas that you mentioned are generally good fishing this time of the year. However, things change and, while we did extremely well a year ago at Potato on crawlers, we didn't find the numbers of fish there this year. A distinct advantage to having fished a lake during 5 decades is the experience to know where to try when things change. When we found the fish, the methods I described worked for us. I'm sure that there are areas on every lake that "almost" always holds fish and Vermilion is no exception. The big change that ocurred while we were there was that the fish moved from the tops of the reefs to the 25-27' break. Once we made the adjustment which ocurred for us around the 12th or 13th, we caught lots of fish. The advantage that we had was that we "knew" where they had been.