SPRING VALLEY, Ill. – After the widespread panic of day one on the Wal-Mart RCL Walleye Tour on the Illinois River, the expectations of a better second day are genuine. The pros who eked out a few fish Wednesday are going forth with slightly improving conditions and, in some cases, the hard-won wisdom from a long day on the water.
“I’ll go back to the same area and try to get more fish,” says Steve Lotz of Lena, Ill., the day-one leader with an astonishing five-fish limit, one of only two, that weighed 12 pounds, 14 ounces. “I think the fishing will improve because the water has crested and the clarity has improved about half an inch.”
Sure enough, the extreme height of the water is going down after reaching its peak at midnight Wednesday, hours before the start of the tournament. By late in day one, many of the competitors noticed not only clearer water but also less debris to foul lures.
What’s more, the fishing seemed better late in the day, when the sun shined – something sauger love. To wit, of the first flight of 40 boats, five weighed fish; of the next three flights, 51 weighed fish. On Thursday morning at takeoff, the sun was already out, raising hopes for the possibility of better fishing.
One such angler who made hay while the sun shined Wednesday was Crestliner pro Jeff Koester of Brookville, Ind., who caught both his fish with less than an hour to go, coming upon them shallower than other anglers in the area were working.
“The biggest difference since practice was that the fish moved off the main channel to the new breaks off the shoreline that had just flooded,” says Koester, who weighed two fish for 5 pounds, 2 ounces, good for 13th place. “So I’m going to tuck in tight to shore until I get three fish to make it to fish on Friday.”
While Koester and the sauger are afforded some relief from the current close to shore, Koester’s pattern consists of trolling No. 9 chartreuse Original Rapalas on three-way rigs behind four-ounce weights, creeping upstream at speeds of less than 1 mph, well below the rates at which other competitors are trolling. All the better, Koester says, for the sauger to track down the baits in the dirty water.
Koester’s tight-to-shore theory and everyone else’s revised game plans will be tested at Thursday’s weigh-in, which starts at 3 p.m. Central at the Spring Valley Boat Club and determines the top-20 cut.
Thursday’s conditions
Sunrise: 5:39 a.m.
Temperature at takeoff: 39 degrees
Expected high temperature: lower 50s
Water temperature: 51-54 degrees
Wind: northeast at 9 mph
Relative humidity: 70 percent
Day’s outlook: mostly sunny; northeast winds 10-15 mph