Chatfield July 1

[DavidHColorado]

Chatfield is producing large numbers of walleye in the 17-18" range at this time. This is a great time of year to look for new spots and to perfect new techniques. I chased both goals this week.

Monday I cast 3" jigs to the weeds edges in the south pits. I drove around and put waypoints in the pit edges that I didn't have and then followed the dots on my GPS at 0.5 mph casting ahead of the boat. This tactic pulled in 8 walleye and 16 smallmouth with the walleye topping out at 20" and the smallmouth topping out at 17.5" (my personal best).

On Tuesday I spent the afternoon pulling spinners. I rarely do this and wanted to learn some details that might help me down the road. I found some fish on the north/south road an d promptly landed two small fish.

I then went looking for new spots and charted the north/south road out from the swim beach and put down another 20 waypoints or so upping my Chatfield list to over 500 waypoints in 1300 acres! This road was packed with fish and I never left it in the next few hours. I kept with my spinner plan and quickly closed in on 10 fish in the fish few hours. A guy from work was shadowing me and every time he looked over I had another fish on the line. Silver blades were working the best with either orange or natural gulp! spinner crawlers. I ended up lindy rigging with Saltwater Gulp! sand worms and casting 3" Gulp! minnows with all techniques producing walleye out of the big groups of fish hanging on the edge of the road.

This bite should be on for a few more weeks so get out there.