Jim K: Roosevelt- 7/19/2026

Lake Roosevelt Fishing Report July 19, 2026

Family fishing / water sports day.  Fished for about 2.5 hours.  Kept 8 walleyes up to 21” mostly casting crank baits just over the tops of weed beds.  Water was one foot below full pool.

I had a family day on the water Sunday with my wife and two teenage kids.  Overall we kept 8 walleye and two 12” bass.  Lost several other walleyes and threw back a few dozen smallmouth dinks. Light winds and about 90 degrees.  Began fishing at 11:00 am.  Fished for about an hour.  Switched to water sports during hot part of the day.  After a few hours we quickly made for the nearest shoreline when the super scooper wildfire airplanes showed up and began filling runs on the lake.  We watched the aircraft display, Seth put on snorkeling equipment and scouted the shallows, then began casting ned rigs for SMB dinks.  On a whim, because of so many nibblers in the area, I dug out a tiny jigging rap about 1.5” long.  Seth quickly reeled in the 21” walleye!!!  It was hooked badly in the gills, so it was a non-decision to keep it. 

On a nearby flat, I kept the boat at the edges of the weeds to provide more variety of possible fishing methods for my crew.  My son had never used forward facing sonar before, so I let him use it all day.  He was using it kind of backwards, but it made sense for the conditions and location.  He would cast, then move the transducer to where he cast to find his lure.  He caught several fish by seeing them rise up to his lure out of the depths or from the weeds.  It did make a difference on a few fish that he probably would not have caught if he hadn’t seen them come out to play.  For the rest of us, I set up upwind of the weed flats and we lobbed crank baits over the weeds and slow retrieved them.  Water depth / weed height was perfect for a mid-sized deep diving flicker minnow to just tick the weeds as we retrieved it.  Fire-tiger color brought in the most fish.  Bite was extremely aggressive.  We lost several walleyes, a few of them good sized.  I feel this was because given their aggressive bite, our hook sets were often ineffective versus the walleye’s tightly clamped jaws on the bait keeping our hooks from getting set well.