
Walleye
Walleye at Lanier. What? Usually when one is caught it’s a surprise most of the year. Here is when and where to change that:
When: New to Full Moon in February.
Where: This will be hard on your fiberglass bass boat, so see if you can borrow an aluminum boat where the dents don’t matter. Travel up the Chestatee to the shallow waters where you’ll be bouncing off the rocks. If you don’t mind scarring up your boat, go for it. If you’re not on the rocks, you haven’t gone far enough up the stream. What’s the target? Spawning Walleye. Even midday, they’ll be there by the thousands from 10 inches to 25 inches. What’s going on? Spawn. Light tackle almost unweighted with red wigglers, night crawlers or whatever you can scrounge up, Walleye like meat, and you will catch a limit virtually every day. I was delivered an invitation to tape an O’Neill Outside with Travis Johnson television show many years ago by the Georgia Department of Natural Resources. What we were showing was not how to catch them but to trap a bunch of both genders so the DNR could take the catch back to their laboratory and breed a few thousand little Walleye minnows the use them to initially stock and re-stock mountain lakes and streams across North Georgia.
It worked. The Walleyes were there then, are now and, like what we did then, you can catch a limit each day. With professional nets that afternoon, we likely captured at least a hundred. You’re gonna do well. The only stumble maybe is if it has been raining and the Chestatee is muddy. If that’s the case, stay home. Not to be bothered by repetitiveness, you can do the same thing at Carters and Blue Ridge lakes. The cool thing is that this space of date, time and locations are the only time it works this way.
In my judgement, the catch is the best tasting freshwater game fish in North America. That tops off the Walleye trips for sure.
Photo: courtesy GA DNR