I want to catch walleye.
I really do.
Although I spend a lot of time making fun of their live bait and bottom bouncers (which sound like a kid’s inflatable toy), I desperately want to be a walleye angler. I see guys like Al Lindner and Michigan’s own Mark Martin hefting giant eyes, and I want to be the guy to put the net on a big, funny-eyed fish.
Sometimes I actually catch walleye. Last fall I caught a walleye while I was pike fishing on the Muskegon River. I accidentally hooked up with a nice little walleye and spent an embarrassingly long time trying to convince my buddy, Eric, that I was targeting walleye. Just that one time. In that one hole. On a spinner bait. He bought it for about six and a half seconds. I stumble into them sometimes, but there’s a serious problem keeping me from being a bona fide walleye fisherman. Two problems, actually.
The first, I will never be a serious walleye angler because of my crippling case of sportsman’s ADHD. I just can’t stand doing one thing for more than a few minutes. That’s why I’m a sub-par turkey and deer hunter. I get bored and want to walk around. This same issue also makes me a great grouse and rabbit hunter. I get to go kick brush piles and look for something instead of waiting for them to come to me.
Walleye fishing is primarily trolling and trolling means you sit around in the boat seat and wait for something to eat your bait. You just drive around the lake and wait for your bait to happen to be pulled in front of a walleye. **YAWN** Sorry, I just kind of dozed off writing about it. Here’s a perfect analogy for walleye trolling:
I would really like an ice-cold beer. Although I know I can go to a specific store, walk in, and grab a six-pack from a cooler, I think I would rather just get in my truck and drive around with the window down until somebody happens to throw one into my cab.
That’s walleye fishing in a nutshell. I told my doctor about my sportsman’s ADHD and he gave me a Ritalin the size of softball and said to take a bite every time I got bored fishing. I went walleye fishing the next day and my Ritalin ball was gone by 11:00 A.M.
That brings us to the second reason I will never be on the professional walleye fishing tour:
I have the worst walleye boat on the West Michigan lakeshore. I named my boat White Lightning. It’s a skiff and I won’t mention the brand, but it’s named after a couple of states in the southeastern region of our country. It’s 16 feet long and will run fully loaded in about a tablespoon of water. It’s white and has a huge casting deck. When it comes to running the river or casting for bass, it’s a pretty darn good boat. When it comes to trolling it’s just absolutely terrible. It tracks like a zombie on meth and one slow turn will tangle every line in the water. Wind will blow the boat all over the lake. And not a small wind either. Any wind. One day a butterfly flew by White Lightning and passed gas. By the time I could react I was halfway to Wisconsin.
This morning my fishing partner, Stan the Man, came by talking about mounting up old White Lightning and doing some trolling for walleyes. After a lifetime of walleye failure, I was skeptical of our chances for success. Stan the Man, however, is the most positive, passionate outdoorsman I know. After excitedly telling me about the possibility of “Big eyes, nasty browns, and maybe even a salmon,” I was as excited and positive as he was. I even threw a cooler in the boat for all of the walleye we would surely have to lug home. We paid $4.99 a pound for two-dozen night crawlers and we were on our way.
Two hours later we had played chicken with a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research vessel in the fog, had a planer board get run over by a giant sailboat, and saw roughly 35 gallons of water come over my shallow gunwales. As Stan the Man stood amidst a giant tangle of Rapalas, bottom bouncers, crawler harnesses, and planer boards he looked up with his ever-present smile and said:
“Hey dude, let’s just go bass fishing!”
Up in heaven God was having a conversation with Mother Teresa and Lou Gehrig. He politely interrupted and asked them to wait a second while he slowly turned a dial that read “Muskegon Lake Wind” from wisp to gale.
“Oh, Me. I love to see that guy head to Wisconsin.” God said, as he laughed with his friends.
So here I sit after letting 24 night crawlers loose in my garden and buying nine bucks worth of walleye filets from the grocery store. I know I will never be a true walleye fisherman but I absolutely hammered the bass today and I made God chuckle…and that’s something.
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