Bounce your way to walleye success This sinker on a wire arm is, hands down, our best walleye rig By Larry Myhre
Here’s the best walleye fishing tip you will get all week.
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.