Nice

Northof50,

Not sure the age of those. 15-18 years old maybe?

Trolling rocky humps with scattered weed. They were at 11 feet last night. 1.3 mph with suspending jerkbaits diving 5-7 feet.

Some nights they are in thick weed 5 feet from the surface, some nights deeper , rock only.

And some nights they will blast up out of 20 feet of water to eat the lure. The hits are ferocious. Very unlike what most people think of when they think walleye, jigging with light hits. These fish SMASH it.

Ya, basically lol.. No one else has their boats in here any more, so I kind of have the place to myself. Plus, I have only ever seen one other guy night fish for them. Not sure why as you only get big fish trolling at night. Darkness falls and everyone else heads in.

Our best night this year was 34 fish with many over 27".

Hutchy - do you run 60 miles an hour across the lake at night? This is a completely random question, of course.

When I'm running boards that 1.2 mph seems to be the speed range they like

Best my 70 will do is 37 lol

Normally its 1.5-1.6.

If they are whacking at it and missing, i drop the speed. if they are hitting, I keep it there to cover a bit more water faster.

It wouldn't take too many of that size to fill the freezer.

True. I mostly catch and release though.

I kept one last night for a buddy though.

Because of the high-protein forage base in Georgian bay I think it probably takes a walleye only about more like 10 years to reach that size. Here in MN they say most times a 30-incher is about 20 years old, but on lake Erie I had a biologist tell me they see some 30 inchers at 10 years old. It would be interesting to know for sure but my gut tells me it doesn't take that long for any great lakes walleye to reach 27 inches. They look pretty darn well-fed.

I can just smell them frying in the pan along with some fried taters...

Garry-

They could very well be closer to 10-12 at that size. They could be younger for sure, but keep in mind that our water is pretty darn cold for a long time. I assume that affects it.

Its hard to know.

But yes, there are times when the ciscoes and shiners are in the shoals heavy in oct when there is always some kind of bait on screen.

Perch all over the place as well, sucker, and smelt, alewives and whitefish further out.



All through oct and part of november when I flick the lights on, I can always see a half dozen minnows on the surface.

I was given a gallon electric counter top deep fryer a while back.

Thats my favorite currently.

Hahaha Yeah

You need to have a great population to be able to catch them. No skill will put them in the boat if they aren't there.


Same way some guys struggle to catch fisher, but I can do 20 a year if I put out the right number of traps, and some guys can do way more than that.


You cant harvest whats not there.

Awesome fish Hutchy. Are they keepers, or is it catch and release?

I might give up trapping if I could catch walleye like that regularly

With the camera lenses now if you take a scale and place it on a black background and snap----you can see the tree rings, thick to thin is the spring feed
( I hated reading scales)

if there are introduced Emerald smelt= then take 10 years off for rapid growth

Man I enjoy looking at them fish you catch. Got to be some fun.

Mac