Jim K: Roosevelt - 6/23-24

I was on Spokane Arm from 8:30PM until very dark on Sunday night, and all day on Monday. My fishing partner and I caught about 15 walleyes and numerous smallmouth bass fishing tops of weeds slow swimming plastic baits on jigs.

For SWC Members:

During our Sunday night fishing, we put in at Ft. Spokane, and targeted a rocky hump and a rocky point and caught two walleyes on small silver flicker shads after sun went down. We also caught several SMB while fishing for the walleyes. Eyes were caught in about 20 FOW over the structure.

Monday we spent first 2.5 hours casting small crank baits over a rocky structure, then various submerged weedbeds without luck. After witnessing a walleye follow a lure to the boat I switched to a 1/4 oz jig with a 3.25” B-Fish-N AuthentX Series Pulse-R plastic minnow bait, color: Chartruese / Orange Core. We caught two more walleyes ticking the tops of weeds with the slowly reeled jig before everything shut down. We fished a variety of locations from Porcupine Basin up to the river above Bouy 7… we left that area after fishing just one eddy as there was virtually no current coming out of the dam upstream. Weather today was the first more sunny day following several days of more cloudy weather. Finally in mid afternoon when a wind kicked up and some heaver clouds arrived, fishing picked up again. We caught the rest of our fish slow reeling plastics, just ticking the tops of weeds, or even dragging them through the tops of the weeds. I did get a few strikes just after ripping my jig out of the weeds. We positioned the boat just outside weedbeds. Most weedbeds were in 15’ of water and came up to about 8’ from the surface. Ended up keeping 10 of the walleye and one SMB. I did not catch a single fish this trip ripping & pausing jerk baits… fish definitely wanted a very slower presentation. While catching walleyes on the slow dragged jig, I even picked up a jerk bait occasionally to see if they would work, but had no success. Largest SMB of the day was about 3.5 pounds. As with my last trips, most SMB were of good size. Largest walleye was about 18”, but averaged about 14”. We threw the dinks back.