Wind played a determining role for many avid walleye anglers in Saturday’s Minnesota walleye season opener.
The National Weather Service reports that wind from the west Saturday reached gusts of 32 miles per hour making traveling Rainy Lake by boat difficult for many anglers, local bait shops report.
Winds remained high on Sunday from the south west bringing warmer temperatures, but again with gusts of 33 miles per hour, according to the NWS.
Tim Shuff, owner of Sportsman’s Service, said that the weekend was pretty quiet with many local anglers preferring to wait for better conditions.
“Wind, wind, wind — it seemed to be a determining factor,” Shuff told The Journal
While he said he heard reports of walleye success on Rainy River, where local anglers hid from the wind, and on parts of Lake Kabetogama, where he said many people tried their luck from docks.
“But Rainy Lake was tough because they couldn’t get up the lake to go further east,” he said. “It was tough. There was not much on the local front.”
A group of three friends who traveled to fish Rainy Lake from Backus, Minn., said they opted to pull their 16-foot boat out of the water early Saturday because the wind was “just too much to handle.”
The group said they each caught at least one fish, but all were too big for the live well.
In addition to high winds, Shuff said he believes that the water temperatures were a little cool to get walleye active. “Things aren’t happening yet, and wind was a factor,” he said of the weekend.
However, he notes, the Rainy River sturgeon catch-and-release season has been productive. “It’s been phenomenal, lots of big fish and lots of fish,” he said. “It’s stayed good the whole season.”
Gary Coran at Rainy Lake One Stop said he heard fairly good reports from anglers able to make it to Kettle Falls and fish the Kettle River, where they could hide from the wind.
“The guys going up to Kettle Falls had bigger boats so they could take the waves,” he said.
He also said anglers reported finding crappies in the Rat Root River and Black Bay.
Anglers who caught walleye, he said, did so in the warmer waters of shallow bays.
He said that he had catch-and-release reports of walleye measuring 19, 23 and 24 inches.
