I know we’ve talked about the weather quite a bit in this year’s fishing reports, but this week’s weather tops them all. We started the week with warm, sunny and calm, went through our biggest thunderstorm of the season, followed by one of the heaviest rainfall days, then “blowout” and cold conditions, and ended up with sunny, flat, and hot again. In short, this week Lac Seul gave us just about every kind of weather it could and the walleye bite reflected that.
With the constant and extreme changes in the weather it was almost impossible for guides to predict each morning where or how the fish would bite that day. The best answer was to keep searching – sand, rock, deep, shallow – and keep trying new tactics – fast, slow, ‘spot on spot’, ‘spot and stalk’ each day until you found a location and tactic that produced one of those good bites. While the top end fish were harder to come by, our searches led to some highlights over the course of the week. There were three daily guide sheets this week that had 20 or more walleyes over 24 inches for the day, and seven boats this week recorded more than 60 walleyes over 18 inches for the day. Looking back on the week all three of those ’20 over 24’ days came using different tactics, and the seven ‘fill the back’ days came from widely varied depths on different structures. Definitely a week for searching rather than patterning. For the week overall we caught and released 16 walleye over 27 inches and 2 over 28 inches.
Fall is here on Lac Seul. I can tell because the weather is changeable, the first hints of colour are appearing on the leaves around the lake, and SWWL guides are going after big pike. Despite the cold front conditions, a couple of groups chose to focus on the pursuit of big pike this week. Weather rules the pike as much as the walleye and it was when the days went sunny and calm that boats really started to see big fish. For the week we caught and released 6 over 37 inches, including a 41, two 42’s and a 43 incher.
The week on Lac Seul was like every other week – just a lot more so. It always helps to search and experiment when walleye fishing this lake, and to fish how the fish and conditions dictate. To generate a good bite this week you really had to.
Brett McCallum
