January 15, 2025
By Ross Robertson
As late falls leaves and early winter arrives, many bodies of water have a period where it’s too soon to ice fish, but there often is enough ice at the ramps to allow only the most determined anglers on the water. I like to call this period open-water ice fishing because it feels like you should be drilling holes instead of sitting in a boat. This often-brief time period is beloved by those in the know because the lack of boat pressure and last-minute heavy feeding can make it one of the best bites of the year.
Here are few tricks to consider next time you don’t know if you should take your auger or boat walleye fishing one more time.
Mark Them During the cold-water period, walleyes tend to bunch up tight. Find one and you’ll find a bunch. In order to avoid a long unproductive day, use your 2D sonar to run at high speeds to mark walleyes that are often suspended off sharp breaks in deep water. Many days finding the bait is a good as finding the walleyes—the walleyes won’t be far off. It is important to remember that when driving at speeds in excess of 20 mph, walleyes won’t appear as arcs on the graph, but tiny V’s or even small BB’s.
Marking at speed with standard 2D sonar is critical to cutting the search time in half. Boat Control Matters Once the fish are located, boat control is easily the most overlooked or underperformed part of fishing in cold water. If you think about how slow you will be fishing in a few days when the lake freezes over, it might force you to slow down your presentation. This includes how fast you are moving the boat. Spot Lock on your Minn Kota trolling motor is an amazing feature to keep you in place without having to constantly adjust the motor or tussle with a giant anchor. The newer drift feature that the Minn Kota trolling motors now offer is an amazing tool to help you deal with the wind and not have to put so much attention on running the boat. While technology is great, I’m never without a drift bag or three.
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Forward-Facing Sonar Love or hate the technology, forward-facing sonar is not only helping us catch more fish, but as importantly, lets us see how fish are reacting to our presentations in real time. Think of it as a 360-degree flasher. While it’s easy to get caught up in chasing a fish with our lures, pay attention to how the fish react to us. Less than 24 hours ago I was out on a 35-degree Lake Erie using forward-facing sonar over a large school of walleyes we found, thanks to high-speed marking.
I was in the stern of the boat with an FFS pole on the port side not marking a darn thing. This was hard to believe since I saw the number of fish we just dropped in on. My buddy on the starboard bow hooked up on his first cast and remarked at how many fish were on his screen. As I panned the FFS pole 180 degrees and underneath the boat to the other side it looked like an aquarium. I found it hard to believe with no boat traffic, no noise and being in nearly 50 feet of water that fish would spook from the boat going overhead, but they did each and every time.
We had to fish the downwind side of the boat with a slight drift to see fish on the FFS screen. Take time to see how fish are reacting to your presence and not just your lure.
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FFS lures Not to start a controversy, but we have hit a period of time where people ask, “with or without FFS”. While most are directed at tournaments or if you are ‘’video game fishing,’’ the same could be asked for your lure selection. On the aforementioned trip this week, we exclusively used FFS and two main lure types. The first was a jig and plastic minnow. The new VMC Tungsten swimbait jig head features a razor-sharp RedLine VMC hook and unique collar design that keeps the plastic up on the shank without mangling it. The tungsten allows it to be seen even easier on the FFS screen and at the same time the denser material allows for a much smaller profile, both important qualities this time of year.
Being that this wasn’t a tournament or guide trip, I took advantage of the time to really experiment and tried dozens of plastic body shapes, sizes and colors. The back of the boat looked like hurricane went through a tackle store at one point. With that said, I still came back to my old reliable Z Man Jerk Shadz in a white or shad color. While other lures got a bite or two, I went through a period where they kept pulling on the plastic and not really committing. Back on went the Jerk Shadz and it was down their throat as you can see in the pic. It was also interesting that the standard 4-inch Jerk Shadz got much fewer bites than the newer 3.5-inch. Size can really matter at this time of year and smaller is often better.
Late-season walleyes waste no effort when eating, typically lures are choked deep inside their mouths. The other mainstay in this type of fishing is the Rapala Jigging Rap. There is something about the quick sinking and darting that just drives walleyes and most other species for that matter bonkers. Don’t be afraid to replace the treble hook with a VMC bladed treble hook one size larger than the stock hook either. Many days this little extra “bedazzle” gets a lot of extra bites.
Old School Lures Long before FFS, anglers were fishing this last open water walleye bite blind and still catching fish. The main difference is where you are fishing for them. Without seeing your lure away from the boat, you are typically fishing lower in the water column, if not right on the bottom like you would be if you were ice fishing. You can still use an ice fishing flasher or traditional 2D sonar for this, but as previously mentioned, many of those higher fish spook from beneath the boat or go much deeper in the water column. This makes heavy rattle spoons like the Silver Streak Rattle Streak a go to because aside from their dozens or eye-catching color choices they are available up to 3/4-ounce in size. Many lures in this category stop around 3/8-ounce and that just isn’t enough weight to fish as deep and as vertical as is often required.
The old basic, yet effective, jig and a minnow is also a go to if you can still get ahold of live or frozen minnows. The VMC mooneye jig has a good color selection and much like the Rattle Streak spoon, is available in larger sizes.
A Rapala Jigging Rap will also still play a roll when not using FFS, just with a little tweak. Instead of casting it around and working it, think of ice fishing mode and tip it with a minnow and fish it both vertically and slower.
This last-minute open water fishing can be very challenging if you don’t use all of the available tools we now have at our disposal, but if you take a little bit of time to figure it out you can have a last-minute walleye paradise almost all to yourself.
Capt. Ross Robertson
Bigwater Fishing