Equation for Quinte Fall Success

Equation for Quinte Fall Success

By Sheldon Hatch

During the fall walleye run on the Bay of Quinte the walleye are migrating into the bay from Lake Ontario following and feeding on schools of Gizzard Shad and Alewives. You have to cover water to find the active feeding walleye so the best technique is trolling crank-baits. You can break crank-bait trolling down into three distinct areas – Depth, Movement and Colour. First off you need to pick baits based on running depth to have success with a suspended bite. The second part of the equation is movement and the third is Colour for the different lighting conditions.

Depth

The walleye will be suspended in the top third of the water column over deep water. Here is where it gets a little tricky because you need to interpret your sonar screen to notice the active fish. Long arches that are moving across the screen in a chaotic fashion usually tell you a feeding frenzy is happen below your boat. Walleye feed up so run your bait above the active fish. The best way to determine what depth a crank bait will run at is a handbook of dive curves called “Precision Trolling” by Mark Romanak and Dr. Steven Holt.

The walleye are spooked by your boat so they are going to move away from your boat. Planer Boards or Dipsy Divers set to three are needed to get baits out to the side and in front of the fish moving away from your approaching boat. If you do not have any planers then you can run long leads of 200 feet out the back of the boat while trolling in a large zigzag pattern so the baits are not following directly behind the boat.

Movement

If the walleye are not active and the water is calm or you are fishing during a cold front you may have to use stick baits. Start with large baits and then slowly scale down in size to finesse an inactive fish into striking. They have a very subtle movement back and forth that will entice a sluggish walleye to strike. They work best at speeds of 1 to 1.5 mph. Page 2 >