While fishing with bobbers dates back to the early days of angling, fishing for walleyes with slipfloats has a more recent and well documented heritage. Mille Lacs Lake in Minnesota is the hands-down birthplace and proving ground for bobber ‘eyes. Granted, the broad tactic is applied elsewhere. But chances are that any variation in popular use today was initially rigged and refined on Mille Lacs’ windswept waters, where rocky reefs rising near the turbulent surface draw walleyes shallow to feed amidst wave-tossed boulders in waist-deep water. Places where snags abound, where the challenge becomes maintaining a bait in the fish zone without fouling bottom and losing lures. In other words, an ideal situation for livebait suspended beneath a float.
In classic application, anglers anchor just above the upwind side of a windswept reef top, shoreline point, or other shallow obstruction, within easy casting distance for drifting a slipfloat baited with a leech downwind, across the tops of the rocks. While fishing a mere foot or two deep could easily be accomplished with a traditional fixed bobber attached to the line, the difficulty of casting an unwieldy float rigged to fish 4, 5, 6 feet or deeper cries out for a slipbobber rig, ideally suited for the conditions.
To rig a slipfloat, first insert your main line through the mounting tube of a prerigged string bobber stop. Slip the coiled string off its mount and onto your line. Pull the ends of the string tightly enough to make a knot that will slide along your line under tension between forefinger and thumb, then trim off the excess. Now thread a tiny bead onto the line, and then a slipbobber, which is basically a float with a hollow stem that allows your bobber to slide up and down the line. Now tie on a split shot and hook, or a small jighead, and you’re ready to bait up.
The mechanics of the rig allow the bobber to slide down to the weight when you cast, creating a compact package with a streamlined delivery, rather than an errantly tumbling trajectory fraught with tangles. When the rig kerplunks into the water, the weight pulls the line down through the slipfloat, cascading downward until the tiny string bobber stop and bead strike the top of the bobber, halting the bait’s descent. Voila! Livebait suspended at whatever depth you wish. Simply grip the bobber stop and slide it up or down your line to set the desired depth, generally inches above bottom at whatever depth you choose to fish.
Fine Points
Slipfloats come in all shapes and sizes, with walleye anglers preferring relatively slender floats that reduce the resistance a walleye feels when it pulls down on the line. Large round bobbers are out—too much water resistance. But neither can floats be too thin and slender, of the trendy European finesse style. Floats designed to be fished in the turbulence of 3- to 5-foot waves must still have sufficient buoyancy to remain afloat amidst the turbulence, with adequate profiles to remain visible. Properly weighted, the float package should remain barely buoyant, yet not at such a hair-trigger balance as to dip and disappear under the first wave top. In essence, call it semi-finesse rigging.
