Up here we see a couple well-defined preferences in walleye plastics. One is that plastics, while they will work all year long, begin to work thier best when the water temps have dropped to under 50 degrees in the fall, peak in productiveness when the water of mid-winter is the coldest and begin to decline in productiveness as the water temps crawl up out of the upper 40 degree range in the spring. Another is that a solid plastics bite in our cold winter water almost universally will take place in open water of rivers and that yet another is the the spring profile and size of plastics used in the spring are generally smaller than those which prove themselves to be productive in the fall when larger baits are readily hit by gourging walleyes. Today's fishing simply proved the last point here. Anglers using plastics were doing very well on the sauger and walleye bite as long as the locally popular baits of three to four inches were getting shortened and as long as the profile wasn't too large. In the fall, baits up to and larger than four inches are common as the water temp drops simply because the fish are targeting larger foods to pork up before winters thin menu gets handed to them.
Spring is different. The natural foods walleye and sauger find in the rivers include smaller minnows which are gathering, like the walleye and sauger, in the same general areas as the walleye and sauger to spawn when the magic temperature hits. Minnow-shaped, streamlined, baits are key now. Instead of baits in the 4" range, spring baits do better if they are compact. The 2" Thumper Shad provided just what was needed today, a swimming bait with a very active tail section. Lots of people were seen biting off the front 1/2 to an inch of another local paddletail favorite which ends its small production size a near inch longer than these Thumpers and the body diameter is much thicker than the Thumper's. I've made up a whole other box of the Thumpers just to go into my walleye bucket and will stay there now.
