The moon, that cold January midnight, was so bright my shadow walked across the ice behind me. Even 50 feet away I could see the small black flag waving above my tip-up.
I'd last checked my lines 15 or 20 minutes earlier and now I had no way of knowing if the flag had just popped or if a fish had been taking line all this time. I kneeled in the snow and lifted the tip-up carefully. In the moonlight I could see bare spool and the line angling away under the ice. There was no reason to hesitate. I reached low and gave the line a hard, continuous pull, then kept the line coming hand over hand.
At first there was only heavy weight. Then came the plodding, head-shaking protests so typical of a hooked walleye. I was able to gain back almost all the line before the fish made a run for the bottom. It was a classic walleye battle. Each time I had the fish nearly to the ice it ran again, but always a shorter distance, until finally I had it close enough to see my split shot bumping on the edge of the ice. The walleye circled the hole, shaking its head like a dog with a rag.
Then the walleye's head was bright against the black water, its gill plates flared so wide they wedged in the hole. I thrust my hand in the water, gripped the fish behind its gills, and heaved it out of the water and onto the ice.
Lying there in the eerie light of the moon, it looked enormous. Its belly hung low as a Florida swamp bass.
"Ten pounds," I thought. "Hell, 12 pounds."
That was 20 years ago, during one of the first seasons I tried night fishing for walleyes. The fish, incidentally, weighed 8 1/2 pounds, considerably less than my first excited estimates. But I was not disappointed. It was the largest walleye I had ever caught, and it was especially noteworthy coming from a lake where the average fish was less than half that size.
It's no secret that walleyes are nocturnal feeders. Those strange eyes, like something from a low-budget thriller featuring zombies and alien invaders, are well adapted for low-light situations. In winter, when a blanket of snow and ice throws a lake into perpetual twilight, a walleye's optics are especially useful, during both day and night. So how important is it to fish after dark?
I once asked a tackle shop owner that question and he looked at me like I was crazy. "Not important at all," he said. "The fishing's so good during the day, why bother going at night?"
Why bother? Because, if you work for a living, chances are in winter you're going to work in the dark and coming home in the dark, and night might just be the only time you can get on the ice. And there's another practical consideration. A small and not-very-vocal group of ice fishermen will tell you (if you can get them to talk) that night is the best time to catch a lake's largest walleyes. They'll say that night-caught fish average at least two pounds heavier than day-caught fish, and that almost all the walleyes they catch that weigh more than six pounds are caught at a time when most people are tucked away safely in bed.
Their argument is that walleyes are much more easily spooked than most anglers realize. Those layers of ice and snow that seem like such a solid barrier give a false sense of security. But anyone who has fished in a darkened shanty and observed the behavior of fish should know better. Even small pike and walleyes will dart away in panic when the Thermos falls over or the door is slammed or someone comes running across the ice to the shanty.
Ice on a lake acts like an enormous drumhead, magnifying sound until it thunders through the water. Certainly there are days when it doesn't seem to matter, when you can chop a hole in the ice, drop a line, and instantly hook a pike or walleye--as if the noise attracted the fish. But there are plenty of other days when a lake can seem absolutely barren of game fish. It's conceivable that at least some of the blame for those days can be placed on all the daytime activity on the ice.
Most of the techniques that work for daylight walleyes work at night. Tip-ups with six- to eight-pound-test line are fine, baited with shiners three to five inches long. Effective jigging lures include Jigging Rapalas, Walleye Hawgers, Swedish Pimples, lead-head jigs, and small spoons such as Crocodiles, Little Cleos, Luhr Jensen Little Jewels, and Rapala Pilkkis. Most jiggers tip their lures with small minnows. Short strikes can be minimized by using just the head of a minnow.
A very slow jigging motion is often most effective. Lower the lure to within six inches or a foot of bottom, and jig it to cover a distance of one or two feet. Lower it slowly, so that you are guiding the lure down, not allowing slack in the line. Most strikes come while the lure is descending. Strikes can be light, so set the hook quickly when you feel any tap or nudge.
Where to fish? A lake near my home in northern Michigan has a well-known honey hole 35-feet deep where daytime anglers often catch walleyes. My father and I discovered long ago that walleyes left that relatively deep water in late afternoon and early evening and followed a long, sloping drop-off toward shore. At first we caught them only on the drop-off itself, in 12 to 15 feet of water, during the twilight hours. Only by accident did we find that late at night the fish were traveling farther up in the shallows. We've since caught large walleyes in as little as four feet of water, though we've had our most consistent success in depths of 8 to 12 feet.
Look for gravel shoals, points, and bays adjacent to deeper water. Gravel and sand bottom are good places to start, but weedbeds in mud bottom sometimes attract fish. We do our prospecting well before dark, cutting holes at various depths, looking for drop-offs, channels, weedbeds, and other features of the lake's topography. Once we pinpoint likely feeding areas we open enough holes to effectively cover the promising water, so that after dark it won't be necessary to spend time--and make noise--spudding or drilling new holes.
So there are good, sound, practical reasons to pursue winter walleyes at night. But if you're like me, you don't need practical reasons. You go at night because you like it. You like the quiet, the solitude, the experience of standing on a frozen lake under a mantle of stars, watching the moon rise beyond the hills. You like the novelty of fishing when normal people are sleeping. You just plain like the strangeness of it. And if it happens that you live in a city and work for a living and can't find much time to fish in the winter except at night, near home, so what? There are worse things.
Copyright 1995 Jerry Dennis. All Rights Reserved.
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