Casting across the threshold from daylight to dusk sheds a new light on walleyes
The first few times, fishing at night is like trying to function in a distorted reality – think of the living room turned upside down, the furniture rearranged, the lights flipped off. It’s unsettling to run a boat across a lake where the familiar is suddenly foreign, where distances are more a guess than a certainty and where landmarks normally seen during the daytime are reshuffled with a new design of light and shadow. So it goes for beginners in the world of nighttime walleye fishing, a place where the nocturnal freshwater predators prowl under the cloak of darkness, much to their advantage.
Things change for the better with a little time and experience. Despite diminished vision, night-fishing breeds an altogether different familiarity and intensity. Spend a few hours after dark on any given stretch of water, and soon lights, landings and homes are like landmarks on a well-known highway. The next time you return during the light of day, though, you might just wonder where in the world you are. Out here under the constellations, in the perfect union of darkness and walleye, you’re that speck in the cosmos, a spectator of satellites and shooting stars streaking overhead. Sure enough, the sideshows are well worth the small price of admission.
I came to night-fishing by way of wishing. It sounds funny, but it was something I knew I always wanted or needed to do, as if it were a pilgrim’s Mecca, although as a teenager fishing at night was both impossible and impractical in the leaky tin-can rental boats that sufficed for watercraft. At the time, I told my mother, who by then was surely accustomed to the fin-and-tail-obsessed musings of her son, that someday I was going to fish at night. A lot. Somehow I never had the same enthusiasm for much else, even though I had never tried it.
The first time, which took place shortly after my move a decade ago to my current home in Northwestern Michigan, showed how difficult it is to be lukewarm about night-fishing. After an evening of walleye fishing on Long Lake, my pals Andy and Eric went in opposite directions with the experience.
It was one for which we were absolutely unprepared. After catching walleyes during daylight, a pleasant experience in and of itself, I was able to talk the two of them into staying out on a calm summer night after sunset. Turns out we had no flashlight, just a cigarette lighter, and Eric was wearing prescription sunglasses, which made the night even darker.
Not long after we put lures out behind the boat and started trolling, Andy and I started catching walleyes that thumped our lures and thrashed on the surface when they neared the boat. Eric started tangling. To unhook them both – the fish and Eric’s messes – we flicked the Bic and worked by the light of one candlepower, staying out until 1 a.m. on a weeknight when we all had to work the next day. Then, when Eric stepped onto the dock, still wearing his sunglasses, he tripped and fell, bruising knees and ego alike. He hasn’t fished with us since.
Andy, however, has become my partner in crime, fishing with me day and night up to four times a week. Together we’ve caught limits of walleyes, removed fishhooks caught in flesh (mine), checked out a muskrat swimming next to the boat at trolling speed and watched northern lights pulse green, purple and silver. Night-fishing was everything and more than I had ever expected it to be.
Tips for catching the phantom huge walleye
On clear waters, nighttime levels the playing field with walleyes. The best action occurs in places where it’s tough to catch a fish or two during the daylight. The usual reasons: an armada of pleasure boaters and startlingly clear waters. Long Lake delivers both of them in spades, as do any number of lakes across the upper Midwest.
That’s where and when it pays to work the night shift, chasing an overgrown, bulbous-eyed perch – yep, that’s the walleye – that has a feeding advantage when the light is dim. Even if the fish have been somnolent during the daytime, the dark is enough to effect an awakening, whereby walleyes sense motion with their central nervous system and with eyes that glow like crystals if you shine a flashlight in the water. Juvenile perch and other baitfish are no match for such finned vampires.
For all the talk of the walleye’s crafty, temperamental disposition, the fish is, in fact, unabashed when the sun dips behind the horizon. If you’re casting the shallows on waters that seemed like a wasteland just hours earlier, you might hook up several casts in a row. It’s possible as well to catch the biggest fish out there – walleyes that measure in feet, not inches – that so seldom come out to play that they’re more often thought to be phantoms. In a way, they’re getting while the getting’s good, when things have settled down and vision is in their favor.
You might say that Andy and I have learned from our mistakes and Eric’s. Now, especially since Andy has quit smoking and a lighter is in no way a last resort, we never hit the lake without flashlights and headlamps. Far tidier than my house is my Lund 2025, where all but two rods – the ones we’re using – are stowed in the rod locker and nothing else, save for a pair of pliers, is on the deck. When it comes to netting fish, we’ve learned the hard way that mesh nets and the tangles they engender with treble hooks are worse than Chinese water torture. We now prefer rubber ones that save heartache and headache. More than anything, from our friend Eric we’ve learned not to be discouraged by our foibles. Epic tangles, no matter how hard you try to avoid them, do happen, and that’s when you have to set the rods down and start slicing line with a knife. We just don’t wear our sunglasses at night.
What Andy and I have opted for is a transistor radio on which we listen to the Detroit Tigers. The pace of fishing and baseball seem to go together. When the action slows, we call the oldies station on a cell phone and request songs – say, Jim Croce or Gordon Lightfoot tunes – that we haven’t heard in a while.
In other words, night-fishing is what you make it. It can be the chance to mop up on walleyes that won’t bite any other time. Or it can be an opportunity to watch your electronics and marvel at all the fish you never seem to see during the daytime. Every once in a while, Andy and I set aside our favorite technique, casting jerkbaits, to troll until the sun comes up. Normally I run the boat, but when it’s 4 a.m. and I can barely stay awake, I let Andy take the controls and I troll a crankbait well behind the boat. Often all that’s there to wake me up is a fish on the other end.
True, Andy and I could have given up on night-fishing after our initial trip, since it is a whole lot easier to fish during the daylight. If we had, we wouldn’t have experienced the big catches on an otherwise difficult lake or the moonrises that light up both the night and the lake with a brilliant, translucent shade of orange. No, without a little pain for the gain we wouldn’t have found new spots we’ve been unable to discern when the sun is shining. But I think it’s better that way, for at night there remains more than a little mystery that all but disappears during the light of day.
Master of the night
You have to give credit where credit is due, and much of what I’ve learned about fishing after dark is from night maestro Mark Martin, a friend and consistent competitor on the RCL Walleye Tour. Here, combining much of what I’ve learned from Martin with a few lessons of my own, are ways to catch more walleyes at night.
There’s no better way to catch more or bigger fish in shallow water, day or night, than with crankbaits or stick baits. A few favorites: Nos. 5, 7 and 9 Rapala Shad Raps, Reef Runners’ Little Rippers and Ripsticks, and Smithwick Rattlin’ Rogues. For the intensity of the cast, strike and fight on a short line, I like to pitch any of them out and crank them down with six turns of the reel before a slow, steady retrieve – nothing fast or fancy. With the Rogues or with Rapala Husky Jerks, which suspend rather than float up on the pause, I prefer to work them in stop-and-go fashion. Crank them down and stop; sweep the rod forward a couple of feet and pause. Repeat. The fish almost always hit on the pause, which you can do for anywhere from a few seconds to half a minute.
To cover water, try trolling. At night, one of Martin’s pet techniques is to sweep a stick bait forward a couple of feet and let it fall back on a tight line. That extra speed, combined with the fade back into the fish’s face, triggers strikes. Running at the walleyes’ level is not that difficult with all the work that Martin, a night laureate, has done to perfect the proper amount of line out with the appropriate weight ahead of a lure. A favorite bait of his is a No. 13 Original Rapala, and he knows that at nighttime speeds of 1 to 1.3 mph, the lure dives to 8 feet on 63 feet of 20-pound Berkley FireLine and three No. 7 split shots crimped a couple of feet above the Rap. With 83 feet of line, the Rapala reaches 10 feet – ideal for cruising in 12 feet of water. To add extra attraction to the lures, Martin paints a small band of phosphorescent paint around the nose and tail of the lures and adds a thin strip of reflective tape to the lure’s side for extra flash. Sometimes doctored lures will outfish plain Rapalas 3-to-1.