Artificial intelligence

Contrary to popular walleye-fishing belief, there are times when artificials are better than live bait

Seemingly countercultural and counterintuitive, Wal-Mart FLW Walleye Tour pro Rick Walter of Casper, Wyo., is at odds with the Midwestern and thoroughly Minnesotan gospel according to walleye – a bucket of leeches, a box of night crawlers and thou. How so? Walter believes in fake, not bait.

Embracing artificial lures in shallow water a la bass anglers, with plastics that would do them proud (Berkley Power Baits, Zoom Super Flukes, Lunker City Fin-S Fish), Walter chucks and winds as if he were chasing a toothless fish of an entirely different stripe. The upshot: The pro won a 2003 Wal-Mart FLW Walleye Tour event on Devils Lake, N.D., casting in less than 5 feet of water with both plastics and crankbaits.

“Here in the West, I had to experiment before I caught walleyes on artificials,” Walter said. “Now I work shoreline just like a bass fisherman would work a spinnerbait on riprap.”

Walter is not alone in his modern-day zeal for the unreal. The reason is that tournaments are more often than not won (and the sweetest top-20 checks cashed) with artificials. Take the 2003 season. At Spring Valley, Ill., on the Illinois River, the handliners (Keith Eshbaugh, for instance) and lead-core trollers (Bill Leonard and Carl Grunwaldt among them) dominated until the finals, when conditions changed and John Kolinski took the title with a jig and minnow. At South Dakota’s Lake Sharpe, Gerrick McComsey won with soft-plastic minnows on a jighead. At Lake Erie out of Port Clinton, Ohio, trollers with crankbaits and spinners with night crawlers – hybrids of artificial and bait – dominated throughout until David Kolb took the title with spinners on the shortened, tempestuous final day. Then came Walter’s win on Devils Lake and, to cap the season, Tom Keenan’s championship victory on the Mississippi River trolling lead-core line with Rapala Shad Raps and Cordell Wally Divers.

All of which is why the philosophy that is emerging among the FLW Walleye Tour pros is, not surprisingly, artificials first.

“It seems that, for whatever reason, artificials tend to pluck off bigger fish,” said Grunwaldt, who hails from Green Bay, Wis. “On a lake, working a pod of fish, you may spend two hours for 20 fish, but only two are over 20 inches. Work those same fish for two hours with artificials, and you have a far better chance for four over 20 inches.”

If potentially fewer but almost certainly bigger walleyes win tournaments and cash admirable checks, it should come as no surprise that soft plastics and hard baits are gaining acceptance in the heretofore crawler- and minnow-obsessed world of walleyes. Plastics make sense on jigs. Crankbaits score when casting and high-speed trolling. And crankbaits may prevail during tough fishing conditions when many anglers would otherwise spontaneously switch to bait. Why get real when you don’t have to?

Plastics: More quality walleyes

“You can catch bigger fish with artificial baits,” said former pro Eric Naig, now field services manager for Pure Fishing, maker of Berkley Power Bait and many other soft plastics. “That’s why tournament fishermen are going to artificials. Maybe you’ll catch more fish on a minnow, night crawler or leech, but in most situations, you can catch bigger fish more consistently on plastics or crankbaits.”

The trolling success at Spring Valley in 2003 was attributable to reduced current flow that spread the saugers out and boosted the utility of covering water instead of parking on a pod of fish with jigs and live bait. That said, jigging with Berkley Power Grubs accounted for a top-20 finish for Evinrude pro Scott Fairbairn of Hager City, Wis., after fishing them against bait during pre-fishing.

“In walleye fishing, we’ve always fallen back on live bait if we had to,” Fairbairn said. “We’ve always had the opportunity to use live bait as a crutch, whereas the bass guys haven’t. Contrary to what we’ve been told for the last 30 years, there are times when artificials are better than live bait.”

In Fairbairn’s case, the saugers on the Illinois wanted Berkley Power Grubs more than live bait when jigging. In Walter’s case on Devils, the walleyes wanted both plastic tails on jigs and crankbaits, specifically No. 5 blue-holographic Rapala Shad Raps, cast around weeds interspersed with rocks.

Walter’s is a novel tack that he has cultivated over the years on Western reservoirs such as Glendo, an impoundment on the North Platte River drainage in Wyoming. There, Walter focuses on 8 feet of water or less, around weeds and shorelines and points, searching for fish that are hunting, not napping. To get after them, Walter takes a plastic bait, skewers it on a 1/4-ounce jighead, casts it out and reels it in.

“When I work a plastic, I work it fast like a crankbait,” Walter said. “I stop the lure a lot right near the boat because that’s when you get a lot of strikes.”

Crankbaits: All trolling, all the time

If Walter’s approach is about manual manipulation of the artificials he casts, Ranger pro Rick LaCourse’s is something of the same, though with an emphasis on trolling. In places with current and without, LaCourse often opts for handlining, a method with 1-pound weights and wire line connecting to monofilament leaders with minnow baits that are trolled without rods – hence the name. For LaCourse, trolling keeps a lure, two when legal, in the fish’s face with flash and vibration unachievable with jigs and bait. In recent memory, handlining put LaCourse into the top 12 in the 2002 Mississippi River championship out of Red Wing, Minn., and accounted for a near miss of the top-20 cut on the Illinois River in 2003.

“I started to get away from crankbaits and what I did best,” said LaCourse, explaining his commitment of late to trolling artificials. “With a crankbait, you’ve got a bait that’s in the zone 100 percent of the time. You’re getting the most aggressive fish, and many times you get the neutral fish that you wouldn’t be able to trigger with live bait.”

An extension of LaCourse’s trolling with heavy weights and flexible minnow baits is one called “polelining,” an adaptation of handlining to heavyweight muskie rods with 10-ounce weights, 60-pound braided line, monofilament leaders and lures, most often Original Rapalas. Again, the reasoning behind trolling the baits crosscurrent, when current is present in river systems, is to inspire walleyes to attack, not to inspect. To do it right with either handlines or polelines, LaCourse bumps the lead on bottom and then lifts, bursting the lure forward and then, with the next thunk of the lead on bottom, drops the bait back in the fish’s face to make it react out of reflex – the same way you would flinch if someone feigned a punch.

For LaCourse, the artificials-first philosophy is a return to his roots – a return to the notions of fish behavior cultivated during years of chartering for salmon on Lake Michigan and walleyes on Lake Erie, near which he now lives in Port Clinton, Ohio. Tournament fishing, he says, is a numbers game, a strategy of covering water and triggering fish that are more consumers than connoisseurs.

“If I’m trolling crankbaits and there’s an active fish, I’m going to catch it,” LaCourse said. In other words, the more walleyes you put a bait in front of by trolling, rather than by precision-jigging with bait, the better the opportunity that five of them open wide in the course of a tournament day.

Cold fronts: Frequent flying

What about when the fish are anything but active? Enter the expertise of Fairbairn, a university-trained fisheries biologist turned professional angler. Fairbairn said that, when pursuing his degree, he read all the available radio-telemetry studies to track walleye movements. In doing so, he noticed that walleyes adhere to fairly consistent locational patterns, without an extreme amount of wanderlust, when weather patterns were consistent. But when a sudden change of temperature indicated a severe cold front, the walleyes moved – a lot. And while conventional wisdom for the last several decades has been to sit in front of inactive fish with live bait, Fairbairn has been pioneering more active methods, including trolling at speeds faster than, ahem, “normal,” to track down and trigger fish that tend to sprint off after foul weather instead of lounging in the same location.

“Walleyes move a lot more during cold fronts than they do at any other time of year besides spawning in spring,” Fairbairn said. “Traditional thinking is that they go hunker down behind a rock and you have to sit there with live bait in front of them for 10 hours. Practical experience tells us that during a cold front, fishing stinks. If you start moving fast, you’re going to run into more of them.”

As a result, a very viable approach is to keep on trucking – and trolling – with crankbaits at speeds of up to 3.5 mph, a full 1.5 mph faster than standard walleye speeds. Extreme speed, which would be a practical impossibility with bait, has worked for the unconventional Grunwaldt as well at speeds of up to 5.5 mph when gunning the motor to avoid a collision in a crowd of trollers. On the Mississippi River in summer, Grunwaldt says he has been rewarded with walleyes weighing up to 7 pounds.

Speed, not stealth, when encountering a cold front and trolling at a quick jogging pace seem counterintuitive after decades dominated by a live-bait philosophy. The lesson therein is that soft plastics, crankbaits and speed make sense – not just for tournament anglers but also for everyone in the world of walleyes.

“I’d say probably 60 to 70 percent of our tournaments are won trolling, regardless of the body of water,” Grunwaldt said. “What percentage of the general fishing population is trolling all the time? Not much. Speed just triggers strikes.”

Crank ‘n’ crawler

If a spinner with a night crawler offers the best of both worlds with a mixture of an artificial component for flash and vibration along with the scent and flavor of the real thing, then perhaps a crankbait with a piece of bait on one of its hooks is as good as it gets. Certainly tipping a crankbait with a touch of crawler is a trick used by the pros that might very well tilt the odds in your favor.

“My tipping philosophy is that the bigger, higher-action baits can handle a chunk of worm,” said Ranger pro Ron Gazvoda of Lakewood, Colo. “From my experience, I think I get more fish, and they are hooked better. I started doing it with half of my baits, and the results supported that I should be doing it on all of my baits.”

But not any old crankbait can withstand the meddling of an inch-long piece of crawler pinned on one of its trebles. The delicate action of a Rapala Original Minnow or a No. 5 Shad Rap is bound to be dampened by the piece of meat, unless some mechanism such as lead-core line or a handline is used to get the bait down. (Keith Eshbaugh tipped the front hook of his Original Rapalas when handlining for a top Illinois River finish in 2003.) Better bets are Reef Runners, Rapala Deep Husky Jerks and No. 9 Shad Raps – bigger baits all.

On any of the baits, Gazvoda puts a piece of crawler on the bottom hook of the front treble, and he shortens the crawler so that it does not stretch long enough to interfere with the other hooks. What Gazvoda then finds is that the walleyes are most often hooked mouth closed on the back treble – which, he suspects, is the result of a scent trail drifting behind the bait. The way Gazvoda looks at it, his chances are thereby better when reality bites.

“If I get one more fish over the course of the day by tipping, the hassle is worth it,” Gazvoda said.