PIERRE, S.D. – It was a banner day for openers on Lake Oahe, with 110 of 145 teams pulling limits to kick off the final regular-season Wal-Mart RCL Walleye Tour event of 2004. Nevertheless, questions remain about the repeatability of the performances given the whims of the weather and the walleyes.
Will the wind blow? Will it rain? Will the better pods of walleyes be where the competitors left them a day ago?
If anything, moderate winds probably helped inspire the bite on Wednesday after heat and flat calm late in the practice period. Heavy rain, however, at midday turned off the fish after a productive opening morning. The real question is whether the fish will stay in a holding pattern, in the same places, for the second straight day when they are spiriting downstream with their typical high-speed migrations on the cusp of summer.
By some estimates, the better pods of walleyes have traveled up to 50 miles since the weekend.
“They’re on the move pretty good,” says fifth-place Lund pro Bobby Crow of Paterson, Wash. “They’re cruising and stopping. You have to wonder whether you’ll find them in the same place or if they’ll be five points down the reservoir.”
While Crow fished a single area Wednesday, landing a five-fish limit by 10 a.m., the determining factor regarding whether the walleyes stay or go seems to be the presence of smelt, a high-protein, finger-length food source transplanted from the Atlantic Ocean.
Their boom occurred on the Missouri River starting in 1971, when 7,100 adult smelt were stocked in Lake Sakakawea to provide forage. From Sakakawea, smelt spread downriver to Lake Oahe, their numbers cresting at 1.1 billion in 1996 before a crash to 45 million in 1999, according to the South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks Commission.
To put another perspective on the precipitous decline, consider that Oahe’s per-acre poundage plummeted from 44 to 2 in the same three years. Biologists attribute the downfall to walleye predation, floods that flushed smelt through the dams on the Missouri and the cannibalization of juvenile smelt by the outlandish number of adults. Still, smelt are, in a manner of speaking, the straw that stirs the drink despite the wax and wane of their populations.
Hence the first-day productivity of leadcore trolling with long, slim minnowbaits such as Storm ThunderSticks and Rapala Glass Minnows, holographic patterns suggestive of the iridescent smelt.
In the second day’s run-up to the top-20 cut, weigh-in starts at 3 p.m. Thursday, when the field begins returning to Spring Creek Resort, about 10 miles north of Oahe Dam on Highway 1804.
Thursday’s conditions:
Sunrise: 5:55 a.m.
Temperature at takeoff: 54 degrees
Expected high temperature: 70 degrees
Water temperature: 62-70 degrees
Wind: from the southwest at 8 mph
Relative humidity: 90 percent
Day’s outlook: mostly cloudy with a 20 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms; light winds becoming southwest around 10 mph late in the afternoon