Today’s Take First
Definite proof of a slide deeper. In the deepest areas that we were today, we found the best fish. In the 19-24 foo areas we had o sor through quite a few smalls to get keepers. In 25-30 feet, we didn’t mark as many fish but the ones that were there were quality fish.
When you see these, it means digging in the mud!
When bloodworms start showing up in the stomach of our fish, that usually means they are out in the deeper depths digging them out of the mud. Cruising mud flats in deeper water can become very productive.
Look for large flats of mud in 20+ feet of water, cruise those mud flats with heavier bottom bouncer and spinners or lead core and #5 Salmos. Pods of walleyes will be out there cruising that mud searching out beds of bloodworms and that means hose fish are on the hunt and will be willing biters.
The Slow Slide!
Up until the 2nd half of last week, we hadn’t been seeing many smaller fish and we had seen consistent depth levels of 8-12 feet and 16-22 feet. These two depth ranges were pretty stacked with fish, and I would say that 80% of this fish that we were catching were keeper quality. We saw a change starting about Wednesday, with fewer marks and the in those depth ranges and the percentage of keeper fish in those depth ranges started to shrink.
Depths that had been absolutely stacked with fish started to thin out quite a bit and catching the same 15-19 inch fish that we had been getting in those areas became much more difficult to come by. Deeper areas started to produce fish, but the number of smalls increased as well.
The water is warming, the lake is getting much greener, and a turnover is occurring. That means one thing for us:
GO DEEP!
We have caught quality fish now in those 20+ depths and are starting to see a lot more pods of fish off the ends of points and off the ledges in the deeper water. Heavier bottom bouncers and lead core will start to be the tools of the trade and long troll runs along basin ledges will become the norm. Also, more Perch will start to show up in cleaning table photos as that is just what we normally see this time of year.
Also, when before we were taking 3-4 dozen worms with along with some leeches; we will up that to 5-6 dozen leeches. The sheer number of fish it can take to end up with 10-20 keeper size fish can be astounding. To reach 10 keepers yesterday, we went through 2 dozen worms, cutting them in half. Now obviously we lost a few on snags and missed bites, but I know we boated over 30 walleyes. That puts the dink-to-keeper ration at 3-1 or 4-1, going forward we will just be catching a lot of fish in order to find enough quality fish to limit out.
If you just enjoy catching a lot of fish, no better time to be fishing Devils Lake than right now.
We saw a bit of a transition this past week, depths that had been absolutely stacked with fish started to thin out quite a bit and catching the same 15-19 inch fish that we had been getting in those areas became much more difficult to come by. Deeper areas started to produce fish, but the number of smalls increased as well. Time to start bringing quite a few more worms with. This always seems to occur in late July and early August and this year hasn’t disappointed.
Hot Colors Of The Last Week!
I would say that 80% of our fish over the last week have come on worms and that is in line with what we usually see. At the beginning of last week, we did get some of our better fish on leeches in shallow water (8-12 feet), but for the most part we are getting the bulk of our fish deeper and with worms.
Good Luck out there!
