River Walleyes on Plastics
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Plastics have really made an impact on river walleye fishing. Plastics allow anglers to change shapes, colors and size with an ease that cannot be accomplished with the traditional minnow or shiner. Jigs tipped with a plastic body often shine in river fishing conditions for a variety of reasons. First off, the current present in rivers sweeps the jig by fish and fish have to decide quickly if they are going to eat. Often, the fish don’t get a chance to scrutinize the bait or lure.
Gulp! Alive tastes good enough and smells good enough, long enough to work well on every river we have fished on the FLW Walleye Tour. The other factor that makes plastics so effective is that we can use bright or fluorescent colors in turbid or muddy conditions for better visibility. We can also experiment with shapes to manipulate the visibility, vibration, size and action. Now for the best part, plastic stays on the jig better than live bait. Cast after cast, plastics stay on the hook. Miss a fish, no problem as the worst thing that usually happens is the fish bites off the tail. In contrast, with traditional live bait, we are in the water a higher percentage of the time fishing unproductively without bait, naked because the bait tore off the hook.
Now the point of this article isn’t to convince you that plastics are better than traditional fatheads, shiners or a half crawler for tipping jigs as there is a time and place for live bait but on many river situations, we are often leaving the live bait in the cooler or bait well. Plastics work that good.
Pitching up onto shoreline eddies and wing dams is a very productive spring presentation on rivers across the region. Casting jigs tipped with plastic tails either cross current or casting them downstream and slowly dragging them back is a very effective way to work plastics so that they catch fish. Dragging the jig upstream gives the body a lot of action as the plastic gets pulled against the current. Cross current approaches generally gives the jig a natural downstream sweep that fish have to snap at out of reaction as the window of opportunity is short, thus a perfect scenario for plastics.
A mistake we see many anglers make when using plastics on rivers is going to light with the jig. The plastic body will cause some lift on the jig. When learning how to read water and fish plastics, err on the side of heavier so that you know the jig is in the zone it needs to be when fishing current and that zone is right close to the bottom. There is a constant debate amongst anglers who fish a lot of jigs about using no stretch lines like Fire Line and traditional monofilament that does have some stretch. For many vertical presentations and some dragging, I love the Fire Line Crystal. But for casting or pitching, I do prefer mono because the action on the jig seems more natural and fluid. My favorite line for this is high visibility Berkley Sensation. Most anglers stress the importance of a highly sensitive graphite spinning rod in either six or seven feet with a medium action, fast tip. One rod in particular that I really like for many different jigging applications is the Jason Mitchell Elite Series JMS66MF that has really exploded onto the rod scene in the past few years.
Plastics are not an end all and will never completely replace live bait but there are situations where I used to really rely on live bait but could just as well leave the bait at home. River walleye fishing opportunities are one such situation where I have a lot of confidence with plastics.
The author, Troy Morris is one of the top rated walleye anglers on the FLW Walleye Tour.