2023 walleye season has begun

[wiperhunter2]

Ira and I got out to Willard today, launching from the South marina around 7:30 am. Water temp at launched was below 50 degrees but once we got out into the lake it climbed to 50 degrees. We were marking fish right off the bat, so we started trolling deep diving cranks, heading toward the Island. We went East of the Island and it never was less than 19 FOW. Once we got North of the island, we started marking more eye looking marks and the farther North we went the deeper it got, until we hit 23 FOW but still no fish in the boat until we started retracing our tracks to an area were we marked out biggest groups of fish, like the pic below:



By the time we got back to this area the water temps were rising, then the big one hit. After a long battle, it turned out to be a big carp.  We kept at it then I lost a good fish that I'm sure was an eye, by the way it fought. We stayed in that area for the rest of the day but switched over to bottom bouncers and finally got an eye right up to the boat before it too got off but at least we knew what we seeing were likely eyes. Finally a hour later or so we got our first eye in the boat, a nice fat 19 incher. As the water continued to rise up to 54 degrees, we decided to try trolling cranks again and within minutes we caught our second and final eye for the day. 



We called it quits at 2:30 pm. After getting home and filleting the eyes I found this in the biggest eyes stomach:



I think the catching will continue to improve as the water temps rise above 55 and with the coming warm up that will likely happen next week and maybe as soon as this weekend.