Jim K: Roosevelt- 7/30/2026
Tried fishing full moon during the night, but didn’t have a bite casting variety of lures over / in / near weeds. Returned to same area just after daylight and ended with 8 walleye up to 20” and several bass by 7:30AM. Most walleye again were caught casting crank baits over weeds.
Wednesday evening while sitting in a parade float meeting for Spokane Lilac Association, I peeked at the moon times and decided to go fishing that night. Moon was full, rose when sun was setting and set while moon was rising. Skies were cloudless and winds extremely light. My mind went to imagining walleye rising to crank baits to silhouette of crank baits casted over them against a full moon lit night sky. A perfect storm for night fishing perhaps? Drove home, hooked up the boat and arrived at Roosevelt at about 11:30pm. Took a 30 minute nap, put boat in the water and since it was night, I kept boat off plane all the way to the weed beds where walleye were caught a week earlier. Started fishing at about 1:00am. I casted a variety of lures over, in and near the weeds. I worked the bottom front edge of weeded with lures. By 3:00am I still didn’t have a bite. But what a wonderful feeling to be wearing an insulated jacket and stocking hat fishing for walleye during a heatwave in July!
I tried moving deeper to shoulder of flats and spot fishing arches on my graph hugging the bottom using a glow jigging rap lit up with a few seconds of a light on it. Tried this until about 4:00am again with zero success. I was actually getting chilled so I sat down and wrapped a few boat blankets around me and shared my “lunch” with Echo, my yellow lab.
Just after first light at about 5:00am I returned to the weed bed. I began casting same deep diving flicker minnow in fire tiger color that gave me success a week ago. I immediately began hooking up on both walleye and smallmouth bass. Fish were not hammering the lure like last week, but bites were still solid… just solid enough that almost all hooksets found the hooks driven into the bony structure surrounding the fish’s lips. By the time I quit fishing the weed bed I had broken off four of the six hooks on this double-treble hooked lure while unhooking fish. It was now about 7:00am and I had kept six walleye up to 20” and two SMB about 13”. I again lost several walleye, and caught well over a dozen bass that were thrown back. Since my son wasn’t with me this trip I finally had access to my forward facing sonar. I was surprised to see how deep my lure was running under the tops of the weeds, thus learning how sparse the weed bed here actually is.
A few springs ago I had taken pictures of rock piles and stumps when water was fully drawn down. One significant rock pile is only about the size of a large living room. When I took the picture of the rock pile, (etc.), I mark where I took the picture from on my chart display with a heart symbol. I take the picture on my iPhone using the Gaia GPS app which links the pictures to a map of where I take them from. So, at 7:00am I headed to the heart symbol of this rock pile and began using sidescan to mark the area including my intended rock pile. With my drop shot rod in hand tipped with a Berkley PowerBait MaxScent flatnose Jerk Shad in “Brown Back” color I used my FFS to scan the area towards the rock pile. I had a large stump between myself and the rock pile so I dropped on that first with my drop shot rig. Immediately caught a 10” SMB. Dropped again and caught a 14” walleye. I ended up never making it to the rock pile, instead moved from stump to stump. I caught several more SMB up to 14” and three more walleye, keeping one 13” eye. Quit fishing at 8:00am well before the heat of the day!