Contributed to the Tomahawk Leader

This weekend’s fishing report for the greater Tomahawk area includes some pretty good walleye and crappie action on the Spirit Flowage west of Tomahawk. The water temps have started to drop a bit with cooler nights and are down in the mid to upper 70s currently. Water levels still remain high, however. We fished channel edges, especially inside corners of those currents, mainly 6-12 ft deep.

We used 1/8th ounce jigs tipped with 3” Chad Gulp bait as the attractant. Gulp is a soft plastic, fish scent infused bait, sold in most bait stores. I was a skeptic of these artificial baits that imitate a minnow until recently. It is amazing how much scent they give off and how they really do fool the fish to think they are a real minnow. One nice thing with them is you don’t need a minnow bucket, you don’t need to keep dipping minnows, or throwing the bucket back in and out of the boat. They are pretty hardy too. Where you would use a new minnow on every fish caught, with Gulp you can reuse it on multiple fish. I’ve caught eight or ten fish before needing to change due to tearing the rubbery plastic finally.

Anyhow, back to the report. We were able to boat over a dozen walleyes of all sizes in just a few hours. We decided not to keep any fish this evening so it was fun just to catch and release. Right before dark we switched up baits to small crappie spinners again tipped with Gulp, but smaller, one inch or so sizes, and also boated many smaller crappies. This evening did not produce any of the big slabs that we were hoping to catch.

Regardless of the outcome, it was a great night of fishing on a great body of water. Remember, ice will be forming in less than 90 days…enjoy the boat fishing while we can.