As we approached the buoy, the huge boulders and rocks deposited there by the glaciers started to appear below the surface.

Many were larger than our boat, extending out from a point into the lake at a depth of 12 foot, giving the smallmouth excellent hiding spots from which to ambush bait fish.

Team member Larry Myhre and I have been frequent visitors to Mille Lacs as it is an excellent fishery with good numbers of trophy size walleye, smallmouth, musky as well as numerous other species of fish.

We’d arrived the day before, hoping to have the opportunity to film a couple of our Outdoorsmen Adventures segments, if the weather didn’t force us to change our plans.

Mike strategically maneuvered the boat through the shallow water, positioning us within casting distance of many of the larger submerged boulders.

We were on the water early, trying to take advantage of nice weather hoping to beat the many fronts that would be coming through the area during the next couple of days.

Since we weren’t sure what the fish would want this morning, all three of us in the boat were rigged with different baits, allowing the fish to tell us which bait they preferred, once they did, we’d all switch to that bait and hammer on them.As we worked our way around and through the submerged rocks, a smallmouth smacked something floating on the surface off to our right.

I quickly switched from my crankbait to a surface popper propelling it in the general direction where the fish had risen.

After several cast, I could see a big smallmouth come up from behind one of the hundreds of boulders to take a whack at my lure.

The bass must have been far sighted or I was a little to anxious to boat a fish as he made a pass at my popper as it neared the boat, hitting ahead of the bait as I reared back on my rod, propelling the bait into the air.

Not to be deterred, I immediately cast right back into the same general area, only to pull the bait away from the bass once again.

This happens a lot in clear water, as the depth the fish is in can be deceiving and you’ll see the fish come up and jump on your bait, which can result in short strikes.

On my fourth cast, I had my hook set down perfectly and a battle ensued.

Smallmouth bass, known as “Bronze Bulldogs” are one of the most powerful fresh water fish you’ll find, diving deep, fighting hard and often going airborne or doing a tail walk across the top of the water, testing the gears in your reel as well as the line it’s spooled with.

The fish, a nice three pounder, gave me all I wanted, then coming into the boat for a few pictures, before being released back into the water.

Mike was the next to connect as another three pounder inhaled his bait right beside the boat.

Since their mouth is much smaller than that of their cousin thee largemouth bass, choose similar bait you’d throw for largemouth only in a more compact size.

Some of the best baits for smallmouth bass would be tube jigs, small crawdad imitating crank baits, smaller worm rigs and livebait.

Smallmouth are an extremely aggressive fish and will attack almost any bait pitched at them, so it’s very easy to fish them out of a certain area.

This is one of the reasons that many bodies of water that hold holding these fish have such stringent slot limits on them.

Smallmouth can grow to large size with the Minnesota state record being an 8 pounder, Nebraska’s record a 7 pound 4 oz. fish with the South Dakota state record smallmouth coming in at 6 pounds 9 oz.

Our morning excursion for smallmouth was a good one as we landed four nice fish one of which was over 4 pounds.

ISLE, Minn. — It was a 14-mile run from our resort to the sand bar where Brett King had found the walleyes the day before.

As Lindy Pro Jon Thelen guided his Deep V Ranger across Mille Lacs choppy surface at 50 miles an hour we laughed about how many thousands of walleyes we were passing over to get to the “honey hole.”

Gary Howey and his cameraman Kyle Nickolite, King and I were hanging on as Jon, a former PWT pro wasted no time getting us to the north end of the lake.

Howey and I, among others, were guests of the Lindy Tackle company, LakeMaster fishing maps and Offshore Tackle for two days of fishing on the big lake. We were headquartered at Hunter Winfields Resort at Isle on the southeast corner of the lake.

King, a walleye tournament fisherman from Claremont, Minn., was guiding for the writer’s event, but his boat was on the trailer today.

He had found the fish the day before and we were on our way to reap the rewards of his efforts.

It didn’t take long.

We tied on new Lindy Spinners behind two-ounce bottom bouncers and began trolling with the bow-mounted electric motor.

Thelen showed us the bar on his Humminbird depth finder which held a LakeMaster chip containing a map of the lake.

“Here’s a rock pile we never knew was here before LakeMaster mapped the lake,” Thelen, who has guided many years here, said. “We’ll follow the top of the bar, go alongside the rock pile and then motor back for another pass.”

We started on top at 23-feet and hadn’t gone far when a 26 1/2-inch walleye gulped my spinner and crawler.

It was the biggest fish we caught that day, although both Gary and King caught fish that rivaled it.

While the bite wasn’t on fire, we did catch two to three fish on each 1/8-mile trolling bass.

Mike, who with his wife Margie, own Hunter Winfields, was fishing the same reef with Jerry Carlson, freelance outdoor writer from St. Cloud who also writes for the Journal’s Siouxland Outdoors tabloid.

When we were joined by two other boats, the walleyes seemed to drop off the top of the bar and set up in deeper water. We followed them and continued to catch fish.

Mille Lacs slot limit allows anglers to keep walleyes under 18-inches and one over 28 for a limit of four.

We caught many fish within the slot that had to be returned, but had no trouble landing enough fish under 18 inches to make our limit.

The spinners we were fishing are not yet available at tackle shops. The new spinners will be unveiled at the ICAST Show in Los Vegas in mid July.

New tackle announcements are usually highly-kept secrets until the ICAST announcement, but Thelen said I could tell Journal readers about them.

Snells are 6-feet long, 14-pound-test fluorocarbon featuring a pair of number 2 octopus hooks. The spinners are painted to highlight the major and secondary colors of baitfish. Beads are high quality glass and color coordinated with the spinner.

We fished with fathead, smelt and tullibee colors on Mille Lacs and caught fish on all of them.

We cut our trip short at mid afternoon as a storm appeared on the horizon. Jon checked the weather radar on his Blackberry and said, “We gotta get out of here now.”

We made it back minutes before the storm hit, thanks to modern technology.

Picture a lake map GPS chip that you could slip into your depth finder that is so accurate it shows contour lines in increments of one foot.

It is so precise that it literally draws a picture of the lake’s bottom.

Coupled with your GPS/sonar you can now place your boat on the exact spot on the map.

Star Wars technology?

Not any more.

Enter LakeMaster, a new company dedicated to bringing the angler accurate fishing maps.

It is a division of Waypoint Technologies, Inc., a privately-owned company located in Little Falls, Minn.

Their goal is to produce the most accurate lake maps available. Their products include high quality paper maps, PC computer software packages and digital GPS lake map cards.

Established in 1992 as a leading edge Geographical Information Systems software company they focused primarily on real estate mapping. In 1999 the company turned to inland lake mapping throughout the United States.

Since then, the company has been sending out crews to map our most popular fishing lakes.

They now have digital map cards available for the Dakotas, Minnesota and several other upper Midwestern states.

For instance, their Dakota’s chip features 247 lakes with contours and 15 more lakes mapped with their 1-foot, high definition contours.

Pro anglers have been quick to pick up on the advantage these new chips give them.

Pro walleye angler Doc Samson rates lake maps as a tool almost as important as your sonar.

“When I go to a lake, I study its bottom,” he says. “Now you have people who do it for you. It’s just a huge advance.”

Another walleye pro, Jon Thelen, of Professional Angling Promotions, has moved his GPS antenna to the stern of his boat, right above his transducer.

“I want my GPS antenna directly over my transducer so my screen will be 100 percent accurate,” he says. “If the antenna were alongside my sonar, as most are installed, I would have about 12 feet separating the antenna and the transducer.”

Anyone who has fished for very long understands the importance of having a good contour map of the lake you are fishing.

It’s a tremendous time saver and just studying it before you go fishing will enable you to come up with a game plan given the season, species of fish and the particular weather pattern you expect to encounter.

Yet, accuracy of these maps have left a lot to be desired and most lakes were mapped years ago by the old, ‘drop a sinker and measure the line’ method.

That, thanks to LakeMaster is changing rapidly.

To learn the full story about their company, check out their web site: www.lakemap.com

This is the time of the year when the temperatures will start to rise, as will the humidity, making for perfect conditions for nasty weather and tougher walleye fishing conditions.

This time of the year, fish have a lot of different conditions they have to adjust or relate to including: rising water temperatures, rising/falling barometric pressure, high water, low water and the summers bright sunlight all making walleye fishing during the Dog Days of summer tough.

There are a few keys to locating and catching fish this time of the year.  Deeper water and areas with less sunlight penetration are where the fish will be located this time of the year.

With the rise in water temperatures, walleyes and other species of fish will head into deeper water searching out comfortable water temperatures.

These deep-water haunts provide the cooler water temperatures that the fish need to survive when things heat up.

There are several reasons that the fish will relocate into the depths. Another of these is that their food source, baitfish has moved down bringing the predator fish with them.

There are several methods that will allow you to take these Deep-water fish, those that have worked well for me are: leadcore line, snap weights or downriggers dragging crankbaits.

During this time of the year, the movement of the fish can vary drastically, especially just prior to a sever weather change.

Fish are able to detect a change of weather well before it happens using their lateral line, which is a series of sensitive nerve endings extending from behind the gills to their tail.

Since they know that a sever weather change is about to occur, walleyes and other species of fish will go on a feeding binge prior to the arrival of the storm, then move deep, lying dormant on the bottom until weather conditions stabilize.

If you are unfortunate to have to fish these dormant fish after a storm has passed through, you’ll need a lot of patience and a precise bait presentation, such as a Lindy Rig.

I’ve had my best luck on these inactive fish by presenting my bait right in front of the walleyes nose and staying there until I make them mad enough to bite.

Since the sun is at its highest point this time of the year and walleyes are very light sensitive, they’re going to be more active in periods where sunlight penetration is minimal.

These periods include: early morning and late evening, as the sun is at it’s lowest point and sunlight penetration is the least during this time of the day.

Not all walleyes will stay deep throughout the day, as there are times when the conditions are right, walleyes can be caught shallow.

One of these is on those very windy days as there’s a good chance that walleyes will move up shallow to feed in the on top of humps rock piles and sandbars.

Because the surface of the water is being rippled by the wind, reducing the sunlight’s penetration, it makes the shallow water areas more comfortable and walleyes will move up from the deep water to feed.

Another time that you’ll find walleyes shallow during the day would be when heavy winds are pounding into a point or shoreline.

With the wind hammering against a shoreline, a mud line is created, dramatically cutting light penetration along the shoreline.

It may seem hard to believe that even walleyes would be able to find bait in the muddy coming back off a shoreline.

Just because it’s muddy on the first couple of inches doesn’t mean that it’s that way the way to the bottom.

In many cases the water a foot or so below this mud line is cloudy or even clear allowing walleyes the opportunity to move up during the day and feed.

In a river, fish will also be in the deepest holes or in shallower areas where there’s heavier current as this cools and oxygenates the water making it a more hospitable environment for walleyes.

During the heat of the summer in a river, an increase or decrease in water, will cause fish to make sudden location changes that anglers can take advantage of.

With a drop in water levels, fish will be forced into the remaining deep holes, concentrating them in smaller areas.

If there’s an increase in water flow, fish will move up stream, up against the sandbars and shallower to feed, taking advantage of the new influx of baitfish and other aquatic creatures that are being flushed into the system.

The Dog Days of summer usually mean deep-water presentations, but under the right conditions, walleyes can be shallow giving anglers the opportunity to fish them with bottom bouncers and spinners, Lindy Rigs or by pitching jigs and crankbaits.

ISLE, Minn. — The fine art of slip bobbering may not have originated on Minnesota’s sprawling Mille Lacs Lake, but it certainly was refined there. The lake’s innumerable gravel bars and rock reefs were the perfect training ground for anglers who wished to perfect the anchoring and casting of bobbers with hooks tipped with minnows, crawlers or leeches to temp finicky walleyes.

But today, a small group of professional walleye angers and guides have taken the technique one step farther.

They have developed a method they call “road hunting.” And it takes the effectiveness of this presentation one step closer to perfection.

Last week I joined professional walleye angler Jon Thelen, Crystal, Minn., and a group of outdoors media professionals at Hunter Winfields Resort on the big lake’s southeast shore at Isle.

We were there as part of Lakemaster’s Media Event. Lakemaster, Little Falls, Minn., is dedicated to producing the most accurate lake maps on the market. Check out their web site at www.lakemaps.com.

The first day, Gary Howey, Hartington, Neb., host of Outdoorsmen Adventures Television, Kyle Nickolite, his cameraman, and I joined Mike Christensen, owner with is wife Margie of Hunter Winfields, for a day of pursuing walleyes with slip bobbers on reefs we would pinpoint with Lakemaster chips installed on Lowrance GPS depth sounders.

We marked plenty of fish on the first reef we looked at and Mike dropped the anchor. We caught a fish, but after 10 minutes, Mike said, “This is too slow.”

He pulled the anchor and said, “We’re going road hunting.”

“Good,” I thought. I’d road hunted with walleye pro angler Brett King, Claremont, Minn., on this lake last year. King was guiding at this event this year as well, but his assignment was to find walleyes by trolling, not bobbering.

Later in the week I got to road hunt with Jon Thelen so I feel confident in reporting the method after observing the techniques of these three fishermen.

Here’s how it works.

Simply cruise downwind over the reef and look for walleyes showing up on your depth finder. When you see a fish, or better yet, a bunch of fish, drop the slip bobbers over the back of the boat and wait for a bite while holding the boat in place with the big motor.

If nothing happens in five minutes, pick up and find another fish or group of fish.

More times than not, one of your bobbers will go down.

The reefs we were fishing were topping out at about 23 feet so our slip bobbers were set at about 20 feet. That’s pretty deep and you also tend to get a lot of slack in the line so knowing how to set the hook is important.

Thelen gave me a good tip.

“When you see the bobber go under, raise your rod to about a 45 degree angle to the water’s surface,” he said. “Then reel in your slack until you see the tip load, then set the hook immediately.

“If you point the rod at the fish, the fish will feel the pressure when the slack goes out and will drop the hook,” he said.

During the three days we fished, road hunting was the most productive method. We caught fish ranging from 14 inches to 27.7 inches. On Mille Lacs, walleyes between 18 and 28 inches must be released.

We kept the smaller fish for a fish fry on the second night just to remind ourselves why we walleye fish.

For more info on Hunter Winfields Resort, check out their web site at: www.hunterwinfields.com

Slip bobber technique:

Slip bobbers consist of a bobber, a bead and a pre-tied knot of dacron on a plastic tube.
Here’s how to set up:
First, thread your line (monofilament) through the plastic tube. Slide the knot onto your line and pull on the two ends of the knot to tighten it. Slid the knot up the line and thread on the bead, then the bobber. Tie a 1/32-ounce jig to the bottom of your line. Pinch on a large split shot about 18 inches above the jig. This will serve as a bobber stop and give added weight to take your bait down.
Attach an ice fishing “Depth Bomb” to the jig to find the bottom and set the knot so the jig rides from one foot to three foot off the bottom.
You may have to recheck the depth after catching a fish in case the knot has slid down the line.

Grab a handful of 2-ounce bottom bouncers and some spinners, a couple dozen crawlers and head for Lake Francis Case.

Troll the mud flats at 1 1/2 to 2 miles an hour and you will catch more walleyes than you ever thought possible.

The mud flats won’t be hard to find. Just look for the concentration of boats.

Memorial Day weekend signals the beginning of some fantastic walleye fishing on this big reservoir. But, it could be Big Spirit Lake, East Okoboji Lake, Storm Lake or any number of other walleye waters within driving range.

The bottom bouncer and live bait rig will be the way to go all summer long.

When word of this unique fishing sinker first came out in the late 1970s, a lot of old walleye hands sneered at this awkward- looking wire with a big hunk of lead on it.

The Lindy Rig was king at the time. That meant a small, maybe 3/8-ounce, sinker which slid along the line so you could feed line to wary walleyes. Fish something like this on those windswept Minnesota walleye lakes? No way.

It won’t work, the informed worried.

The sinker had been invented to fish the Missouri River reservoirs. Here, you needed to cover a lot of water fast to find fish.

Depth finders were not the precision instruments they are today. You fished by pulling spinners on points until you found walleyes. The 2-ounce bottom bouncer allowed you to fish fast, maybe three miles an hour or more and cover a variety of depths at the same time.

It wasn’t until South and North Dakota walleye professionals began winning tournaments that the bottom bouncer got serious attention.

Today, it is a staple of walleye fishing.

If you only have one size, choose the 2-ounce. It can fish water from 12 feet to 20 feet effectively and that is where the walleyes will be most of the time. Tie on a spinner, two hooks for a nightcrawler rig, one hook for a leech or minnow. Length of snell should be about three feet. And begin trolling.

Don’t let out too much line. At your trolling speed, the line should enter the water at a 45-degree angle. The wire should just “tick” the bottom. The only way to fish this rig wrong is to let out too much line and cause it to drag.

The latest refinement is to place a small colored bead above a hook and fish a half of night crawler. It’s deadly.

Bottom bouncers come in a number of weights, but you can’t go wrong with an assortment of one ounce, two ounce and three ounce sizes. You can fish all depths with these.

One of the big advantages of the bottom bouncer is that it is relatively snag free. Keep your snells relatively short to keep the hook from dragging and snagging up. If snags aren’t a problem experiment with snell length.

On Minnesota’s Mille Lacs Lake, for instance, 6-foot snells and a single hook are the rule.

So, experiment. But right now, on Francis Case, a spinner on a three-foot snell and bottom bouncer will catch your limit of walleyes in no time.

Just fish them in shallow water. Or fish them in deep water.

Well, that’s not really the case but I did want to get your attention.

In lakes such as Spirit Lake in northwest Iowa, you’ll find a lot of walleyes in the weedbeds this time of year. Look for cabbage beds or mats of coontail on the flats and you can rest assured that walleyes will be taking advantage of this shade and cover and can be caught.

On the other hand, rest assured there will be plenty of walleyes cruising the main lake basin which in this lake bottoms out at about 22 feet or so. There will be no structure, just a flat, dishpan shaped muddy bottom for the most part.

In reservoirs such as Lake Francis Case, Lake Sharpe or Lewis and Clark Lake on the Missouri River system, walleyes will be scattered throughout flooded trees in the deeper Francis Case or cruising the old river channel in the shallower Sharpe and Lewis and Clark lakes. In these lakes you will need to get down to 30 feet or so to reach the fish.

There’s a method of fishing deep walleyes which has been growing in popularity the past few years. There are few walleye crankbaits that will dive to these depths, most bottom out at somewhere from 12 to 18 feet. There is, however, an easy method to take these crankbaits to the deeper walleyes where walleyes are cruising in July and August.

It’s called snap weight fishing. It involves attaching a heavy sinker in front of your crankbait by means of a line release similar to those used in deep water salmon fishing.

In a nutshell, here’s how it works.

Using a line counter reel spooled with 14/6 Fireline (a good choice for crankbait trolling) let your crankbait out 50 feet from the rod tip. Next, clip on the line release to which is attached a special lead weight. Next, count out more line from the reel. Engage the reel, place it in a rod holder and begin trolling 1.5 to 2.5 miles an hour.

The weight acts as a mini-downrigger ball. Let that weight down 25 feet, figure about 5 feet for the diving depth of your lure and you should be swimming that crankbait at about 30 feet.

The key word here is, “should be.”

There are a lot of variables involved which will determine just how deep your lure is really running.

Let’s look at some of them.

The weight attached to the line release is the major factor. Thing is, as you troll resistance of the lure and the line will cause the snap weight to ride out and up behind the boat. While a downrigger with a 10 pound weight will stay almost directly under your boat, a four-ounce weight attached to the line clip will not. If you are trolling the weight 30 feet down, it will probably extend more than 45 degrees behind straight down so that weight is considerably shallower than 30 feet.

That’s why you should use the largest weight you can get by with when trying to reach considerable depth. A six-ounce weight would not be out of line for depths of 30 feet or deeper.

Line diameter is another factor. The larger the diameter of your line, the more resistance it will have in the water column and the shallower both your lure and the snap weight will run. That’s why I recommend a superline such as Fireline. A 14/6 designation means this line has a breaking strength of 14 pounds, but is the same diameter of six-pound monfilament. No many of us would want to try trolling crankbaits on 6 pound test line. Too much stretch, too hard to hook fish and too light for a hard fight behind a moving boat.

Speed is the third factor. The slower you troll, the deeper your lure and snap weight will run. Increase that speed and the weight and lure will rise shallower.

Another factor is the diving ability of the lure. If it is a deep diver, it will, of course, dive deeper than a shallow diver. There are lure dive charts available to tell you just how deep many crank baits will run at a certain speed and line diameter, but as a general rule you can figure a deep diver such as a number 5 Shad Rap will dive about 5 feet on 50 feet of line and perhaps reach 12 on 120 feet of line.

What you should really do is troll your lure and snapweight over a flat to determine how deep the snap weight is when the lure begins to hit bottom. That will tell you how deep your lure is running below the snap weight at a certain speed. I usually do this at 2 mph and figure a slower speed will get the whole rig a little deeper and a faster speed will move it a little shallower.

You can buy snap weight kits and they come with a variety of sizes of weights. These will work well in shallow glacial lakes such as Spirit Lake, but the weights are not heavy enough for really deep trolling. The releases will work just fine, but obtain some dipsey sinkers in weights of from four to six ounces for deep water.

Unless you line release has a little pin in the middle of the rubber pads, below which you pinch on the line, you will find that the release, with the sinker attached, will sometimes fall off the line, especially if you are using super line which tends to be small diameter and slippery. To prevent that, attach a large snap swivel to the release ring which holds the sinker and close the snap over your line below the release. Now if it falls off it will slide down to the lure and you can retrieve it.

If you haven’t used snap weights before the information I’ve set down here should get you started. For a lot of fishermen, snap weights have replaced lead core, but not for me. I generally run lead core rods on the outside of the boat and two snap weight rods off the back end. Some days one produces better that the other for some reason.

For more information on snapweights fo to www.offshoretackle.com