Andrew Martinsen's Walleye Fishing Secrets

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Andrew Martinsen's Walleye Fishing Update


Catching Large Walleye

Tournament-Tested Tips for Catching the Big Ones

Most of the large walleye are going to be female. As they get older, these ladies become more sensitive to light and noise.

They also are incredibly suspicious and will move on if something is off. Smaller walleye tend to be more forgiving, but you will need to be careful of your approach if you don't want to spook the big ones. Idle or use an electric trolling motor to move past the area you want to fish. Drop your anchor and let the wind or current push you to the spot you desire. If trolling is on the menu, run the lines of the sides with inline planer boards. If you are hitting the ice for walleye, give the hole an hour's rest before dropping your line.

One mistake some anglers make is staying in one place. If a scale-tipping walleye is what you want, you are going to have to be on the move. Checking known hotspots is fine, but you really need to cover the entire water in order to catch a big beauty. A large body of water, five thousand or more acres, is more likely to be hospitable to larger walleye than waters that cover between five to one thousand acres. In order to cover that much area effectively, you will need to have some quality electronics onboard.

One of the best tools for catching big walleye is a sonar unit. A sonar unit is your underwater eyes and can tell you a great deal about what is going on beneath the surface. Spend some quality time with the manual or online tutorials so that you know what every bleep or blurb means. It is also important to know how the manual mode functions. Auto mode doesn't allow you to make sensitivity or gains adjustment. To get the best possible resolution, you should set the unit to show no more than a twenty-foot swath of the water column.

There are many ways to draw out the fish once you find them and it behooves you to be versatile. Experiment with different methods and lures used in walleye fishing to find the ones that work best for you. Big walleye are notorious for ignoring one presentation, but going mad over another. Sometimes it's hard to change when the bite is good, but that's exactly when you should. Frustration and disappointment will run high if you wait until the conditions become dismal, which might keep you from trying anything new.

Confidence is a key component to successful walleye fishing. Being comfortable with your sonar unit and several different presentations will go a long way to catching a trophy walleye. Tournament anglers catch the big fish because they adjust and adapt to changing conditions with ease. Taking a few tips from their playbook will help you attract that trophy walleye you've been dreaming of.

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