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

Work the wind

I should mention, too, that Liam and I found those easy-to-cast-to walleye under less than ideal conditions. For certain, the overcast skies and optimal early-summer water temperatures played right into our hands, but had there been a breeze blowing onto shore, we probably would have enjoyed a day of walleye fishing for the ages. Indeed, wind and waves roiling up the shallows is so important most days that it trumps every other factor. Even on the brightest, hottest days of midsummer, you can usually find shallow fish to cast to, as long as it’s windy.

Unfortunately, however, most walleye anglers are self-fulfilling creatures of incessant habit and miss out on such opportunities. Instead, when the day dawns bright and sunny and it’s unseasonably warm and windy, they envisage the bite to be tough. S,o they execute their game plan accordingly, fishing ever-smaller baits and lures in ever-deeper depths, on the protected, calm side of the lake. If only they’d let the wind push them to where they could easily reach the fish with a well-positioned cast.

That’s what I did with my good friend and Outdoor Canada food contributor Cameron Tait, along with his daughter Maddie, one sultry day last August. No self-respecting walleye angler would have deemed the conditions to be idyllic, but we knocked the walleye ball out of the park—thanks to the wind.

We started the morning casting half- and 3/4-ounce Freedom Hydra jigs tipped with five-inch Bass Magnet Shift’R Shad swimbaits (above) to walleye swimming overtop a series of offshore humps and shoals in 28 to 30 feet of water. At the second spot we fished, however, we let the wind blow our boats off the deep edge of a boulder pile toward the adjacent shoreline of a low, treeless, windswept rock island. There we discovered that for every walleye feeding in the deep water, there were three to five more up shallow, where most walleye anglers fear to venture.

Better still, while the deep walleye were listless, the shallow fish were lively, even at high noon on that bright sunny day. For that we could thank the ideal light-dimming conditions created by the waves crashing onto shore. It’s a winning pattern pro bass anglers have fine-tuned to perfection, yet most walleye anglers seem too terrified to try it.

So, repeat after me: Wind and waves are a walleye angler’s friends. There are worse things you could do than cast to shallow shoreline structures and cover on the windy side of a lake.