If you were a minnow trying to live a long life, like maybe to 4, where would you choose to hang out? In the open where there's nothing between you and packs of marauding walleye and northern pike or hidden between clumps and stems of weeds which also, as it turns out, form the basis for all the food you, as a minnow, need?
It's a no-brainer, isn't it? even for a minnow-sized brain. Minnows like the weeds. And walleyes eat minnows!
Weedbeds are packed with all types of aquatic life, not only minnows but insects like dragonfly and damselfly nymphs, perch, rock bass, frogs, leeches and -- walleye and northern pike.
Most people know about the northern pike. Weedbeds are a favorite location for casting pike lures. Fewer people realize there are also lots of walleye in these spots.
Weedbeds are the supermarkets of the lake.
Yet fishing there, especially for walleye which are at the bottom of the maze of weeds, can be an exercise in futility.
If you try to troll crankbaits you are continuously reeling in to remove a weed from your lure.
If you try to troll with walleye spinners every part of the rig, from the sinker, to the knot, to the hook catches weeds.
You can do a little better by casting and jigging. You might be able to make a few jigs before hooking a weed, but you still catch bunches.
But there is one technique that lets you spend most of your time fishing and just a little extracting weeds. That is to use a slip bobber, a small jig and a leech.
Go to the farthest edge of the visible weedbed where the water is the deepest and then anchor 30 feet or so farther out yet. Pick a spot that is not secluded -- walleye likes lots of oxygen that comes from the wind aerating the water. A weedbed on the side of an exposed bay is good.
So is the entrance to a bay where the current carries the oxygenated water. The entrance to virtually every bay has a current. That's because there is almost always a creek that feeds into the bay somewhere.
A simple but effective rig is to use a small jig, say 1/16 oz, beneath a slip bobber. Always use a leech rather than a minnow or a worm. That is because these places are loaded with perch which have an uncanny knack for stealing minnows and worms but can't usually get the tough little leech off your hook.
If you haven't fished with a slip bobber before, they work like this: the first thing you do is put a tiny rubber stopper or small piece of string that comes with the bobber on your line. The line then feeds right down through a hollow quill at the top of the bobber and out another quill at the bottom. Beneath this tie on your small jig.
Move the stopper up your line to about a foot less than the depth of the water. So, if the lake is 12 feet deep, put the stopper 11 feet up your line.
The stopper is so small it just winds up with your line on your reel. You wind in all your line so that you just have the bobber and the jig beneath the rod tip. Then you cast the outfit to the spot you have picked in front of the weedline and the jig pulls the line down until the stopper hits the quill at the top of the bobber.
You can make very long casts with a slip bobber whereas with a red-and-white plastic clip-on bobber you must sling the bobber plus all your line and jig dangling beneath it.
The slip bobber will tell you if you have chosen the right depth to fish. If you placed the stopper too high up on your line, the bobber tips over because the jig hit the bottom and isn't making the bobber ride upright . If you fish too shallow the bobber floats along fine but you just don't catch anything. You want your jig and leech down near the bottom where the fish are, just not on it or you will catch weeds. So you will need to make a few practice attempts before figuring out the proper depth.
Use the wind, if there is any, to drift your bobber along, covering new territory. If the bobber stops moving but doesn't go under, you've hooked a weed. Pull the rig loose and if you think you've got a weed, bring it back in and remove it.
Fishing vertically, however, means your hook will move right past many of the weeds compared to pulling it horizontally and hooking all of them like when you are casting or trolling.
You will usually find the walleye are on the edge of the weedbed where the weeds are sparse and your bobber moves more or less unobstructed. Walleye are usually in the deepest part of the weeds although in windy conditions they might be much shallower. If there is a rockpile amid the weeds, fish up close to it.
You can also use the slip bobber technique to fish rocky shoals where there are no weeds but which are too uneven to troll and where you constantly hang up by standard bottom-bouncing a jig.
The slip bobber is a deadly way to fish. Give it a try on your trip to camp this summer.
Top photo by Bow Narrows Camp angler Bob Edwards.
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