Times Are Changing

Fishing Report 10-19-2022

By Cody Hill, https://www.chillguideservice.com/

The leaves are changing, docks and lifts are starting to come out of the water for the season. We even saw our first few snowflakes!

With the cooler night temperatures, we’ve seen the water temperatures start to drop very quickly. This weekend was a fun one, but you had to work hard to keep on the fish. When they bite it equaled quality fish.

Minnow bite was our golden ticket, but presentations had to vary depending on what you wanted to target. That has been a change from the past few weeks.  If we pulled a Lindy Rig with a Creek Chub or Sucker minnow, we couldn’t keep the smallmouth bass off our lines. If we used a jig and the same minnow, it produced all our walleyes and only a few random basses.

I always stress attention to detail, and once you find a pattern. It can make it easier to find active fish.  All our smallmouth were all between the 23 and 24-foot depth contour lines on my Lake Master Map.  This was very unique, sometimes we were tight to weeds and other times, we were more than 50 feet away from them. After we caught onto that presentation it produced a lot of fish throughout the area we fished.  A simple Lindy Rig with a medium-sized minnow produced amazing.  If you are on a good smallmouth bite watch carefully as you reel in a fish. Sometimes others will follow the fish up that happened to us a few times. It allowed us to get doubles by dropping your line a few feet below the boat and letting your minnow swim around.

Walleyes, on the other hand, were very deep first thing in the morning but in the middle of the day and afternoon. They were up in that 14-17 feet of water in large schools.  Our biggest walleyes came from deeper water roaming flats but with the clear wat, er the fish found us instead of us chasing them.  This presentation worked till mid-day when the schools that had been under us for an hour disappeared without a trace.

We found fish in shallower water roaming flats with deep water adjacent.  The fish were very curious but not necessarily aggressive.  Livescope showed almost every cast having 2-3-4-5 fish looking at our lures as we would cast over the flat but rarely did one of the fi following the lure bite.  Almost all our bites came off a fish coming in from a distance away and attacking it instantly instead of the fish following our jigs.

There is still time to get out and enjoy fall! Fall fishing is one of my favorite times of the year to fish!

It is never too early to start thinking about booking ice fishing trips!  A trip makes a great stocking stuffer!

I’d love to get something in the books! Contact us today!

To book a trip contact Cody Hill, CHill Guide Service, 218-443-3813.