How to catch more—and bigger!—walleye by casting artificial lures

It’s a safe bet your favourite early-season walleye presentation involves trolling or vertical jigging. More than likely, you pull spinner rigs, crawler harnesses, crankbaits, jerkbaits or slow death hooks behind bottom bouncers, leadcore line and planer boards. Or, like legions of other anglers, you start—and finish—most days dropping jigs tipped with minnows, leeches, nightcrawlers or soft-plastics over the side of the boathere’s good reason to do all these things—namely, they work a lot of the time. The thing is, they don’t always produce, and that’s why you need to expand your repertoire to include casting. Before last summer was even half over, I caught more big walleye than in any five-year period, with 80 per cent of those fish caught by casting. There’s a whole host of reasons why casting for walleye routinely thrashes trolling and vertical jigging presentations, if you keep the following tips in mind.