It was 3 yards and a cloud of dust, about every 10 seconds, for 6 hours straight. The game was in Saginaw Bay in 12-14′ of water off the Crib. The trolling angles changed several times as the wind was ripping out of the Southwest, but the copper game was on.
5 rods per side deployed off planer ski’s (the BIG boards). We ran a diver and downrigger as well on each side just to keep them honest. They each had a lot of action as well, but it was the copper all day long getting whacked.
Silver Streak Walleye Spoons
The baits are pretty standard over here on Saginaw Bay. If you aren’t pulling walleye spoons, you aren’t having the action that we were. Sure you can drift with crawler harnesses as we saw several guys doing this day, but as we flew by at 3.2 gps speed over ground with 4 fish on at a time, it was pretty obvious as to which team was going to win.
Over 100 walleyes were landed, 30% of them were shorts, but that is okay. It is great to see the Saginaw Bay fishery with several year classes of fish knowing that it will be the walleye mecca for years to come.
We started off with each of the 10 reels rigged with 30′ of copper and then the remainder of the reels just filled up with Blood Run Hi Vis Copper Backer Line. 10′ of 20lb Blood Run Fluorocarbon Leader tipped off each of the copper segments. Walleye spoons on every rod, most of them with copper colored backs.
We deployed all of the copper line and snapped the backer to a release with a rubber band half hitch and sent them down the tether towards the big ski planer board. We staggered them about 8 feet up from each other, giving each enough room to slide out of the spread once we hooked up.
5 rod spread per side
It was pretty much non stop from there, 2 on, 3 on, up to 6 fish on at a time. It is pretty easy to tell when a walleye smacks a copper rod, it will break the rubber band and away she goes.
About half way through the trip, the bite slowed to a pick, and we decided to let out another 20 feet of backer line on our copper rigs as shown on our line counters, and it was game on again! The extra foot or two of depth picked up by slipping the copper further back was what they wanted later in the morning, and we gave it to them.
As we continued to pound on the fish, we quickly realized that in order to boat that many fish that fast, there was no way you could pull this off with a jet diver program or certainly not a drop weight program. Resetting divers, and removing and replacing snap weights would be an unbelievable hassle and produce alot of tangles. The quick in and out deployment of the short copper segments was about as efficient and effective as you could be fishing a fast and furious program such as this.
If you are looking to catch more walleyes, and fast, there is a simple way to do it. Leave the crawler harnesses at home, crank up your trolling motor, send a couple copper segments out on each side of the boat on inline planer board or big ski boards and hang on. And don’t forget your copper-colored spoons either..
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