Waiting game

Hall stands pat, stays put to take RCL Tour lead on Lake Oahe when walleye are hightailing it

Pierre, S.D. – In typical bewitching fashion, Lake Oahe handed out its share of trickery Thursday in the stretch run for the top-20 cut in the final Wal-Mart RCL Walleye Tour qualifying event of the year. Even so, staying one step ahead of the sorcery, focusing on precise protrusions from an underwater hump rather than targeting suspended smelt chasers, Lund pro Bill Hall of Algona, Iowa, came up big with a five-fish limit weighing 14 pounds, 6 ounces take the lead heading into the semifinals.

With a serious flip-flop of the standings, half of the top 20 from Wednesday stayed there at the end of competition Thursday, the other 10 falling out. A primary reason was a more dicey trolling bite for suspended walleye that had been hanging around schools of smelt.

That’s not to say that the smelt didn’t have an impact on Hall’s performance.

“The bait is out over deep water,” says Hall, who totaled 30 pounds, 14 ounces. “In the daytime these fish will go out and suspend. The more sunlight, the deeper they go.

“Then they’ll move up on the points at the same depth they were suspended. They’re in the same depth range they were in when they’re eating the smelt.”

Another factor for Hall was the considerable water clarity of up to eight feet, which often meant he wouldn’t mark the fish in the cone angle of his electronics but nevertheless caught them when they’d track down his baits from a distance. The fish, too, would show up in a moment’s notice on the productive fingers of the sunken hump.

“You might not see big fish for a while, but then, boom, there they are,” Hall says. “It’s not a matter of hitting 30 points to find them.”

Wandering ways

The day played out with an altogether different story for some of the trollers who were targeting the suspended fish that were chasing the smelt. A case in point is fourth-place Lund pro Bobby Crow of Paterson, Wash., who had to hit three spots instead of one the day before to get the job done. With brighter skies and calmer water, both bait and walleyes were running deeper.

Still, Crow turned up a 13-pound, 1-ounce limit to breeze into the semis in fourth, with 28 pounds, 15 ounces.

Weighing 28 pounds, 15 ounces as well with a trolling pattern was Ranger pro Bill Leonard of Estherville, Iowa, who says the schools of walleye and smelt have traveled from 60 miles upstream of the launch at Spring Creek Resort to about 30 miles away over the course of the last week. Even with the same weight as Crow, Leonard finished third on the momentum of a first-day tiebreaker of the bigger weight, 16 pounds, 11 ounces.

“A lot of the fish are migrating south, and each day you can almost see it happen,” Leonard says. “They’ll easily migrate a couple of miles a day or overnight.”

Troll me not

Recovering nicely after a 53rd-place, first-day finish, with 12 pounds, 3 ounces, was Bruce Samson of Minnetrista, Minn., who ended up making the cut in 10th place behind Thursday’s weight of 15 pounds, 2 ounces.

Samson, a master of live-bait angling who won the 2002 RCL Championship and $300,000 on the Mississippi River out of Redwing, Minn., was one of the beneficiaries of a better bait bite on a day when trolling faltered somewhat.

Samson says he has been able to relocate itinerant fish by looking with his electronics and moving down the reservoir.

“I’ve been burned so many times out here by my fish moving,” Samson says. “You have to move, too.”

A case in point of the fish moving was the performance of Lund pro Todd Frank of Pulaski, N.Y., who was one of 10 pros to drop out of Wednesday’s top 20 after a diminished second day. After 14 pounds, 1 ounce for openers, Frank managed 11 pounds, 10 ounces, his two-day total good for 26th place.

To get what he did Thursday, Frank spent most of the day trying to relocate the fish – biting fish, in particular – which he wasn’t able to do until the last half hour. Frank was trolling deep-diving clown-colored crankbaits 150 and 180 feet back on Berkley FireLine to get into the 20- to 25-foot range.

“I think there’s a transition going on and the fish aren’t biting,” Frank says. “It was chock full of bait up by the Cheyenne River. The bait had moved four miles downstream today, and both the fish and the bait keep moving. The smelt have left where we had been fishing.”

Now the hope for leader Hall is that his fish stay put, something he expects to occur given the situation he is working, where the walleye show up on specific points to feed in flurries. And all sizes show up when they do.

“The big fish are with the little fish,” Hall says. “You might get a 14-, 15- or 16-incher and then you get a 23-incher. The small fish are more aggressive, so they get to the bait first. You have to have patience.”

For Friday’s semifinals, a test of patience will be pitted against the challenge of relocating nomadic Oahe walleye. Competition begins anew at 7 a.m., when the top 20, starting again at zero, depart from Spring Creek Resort, about 10 miles north of the Oahe Dam on Highway 1804.