Whats the deepest that you have caught walleye

[garytheguide]

up here we catch those bass in 30 plus alot...usually late august and thru the fall....

[matthothand]

96 down in 106 fow on superior this summer. I didn't catch it myself but I set the lines...does that count? I hope it does cause that means I've caught lots of big fish. On occasion when fishing lakers people pick up eyes in deep water on lake superior. I've 'heard' of as deep as 120 but up here the top 20 fow is the target zone. Well that's what I'd fish. Northlander may have other insights on that though.

[walleye_guy18]

my dad went on a trip to canada a few years back and he said the guide was doing a similiar thing were he would bleed the air out of the fish. I wish I knew if it worked or not because I usually stay away from deep water if I don't feel like keeping fish. Any of you guys use this technique?

[eyepatrol]

Yep...usually happens right when I stick the knife in to fillet them! Just kidding....couldn't resist there.

I've heard of guys doing this too. Got a co-worker that goes to Minaki in Canada each year and I think they have bled the air out of fish before. Not sure how successful of a process it is though.

[JIvers]

You can take sauger and walleye from the deep plunge pools right below the locks on the Mississippi from late fall to early spring. I have taken them from water that was over sixty feet deep, and have marked fish at seventy feet or more below Lock and Dam 5a, although I have no way of knowing if those were walleye or not.

As has been pointed out, you can catch walleye and sauger (mostly sauger) from very deep water; the question is whether you should. Those fish I pulled up from fifty to sixty feet were mostly very small fish, and suffered from air bladders coming out their mouths due to the major pressure change. That is why I no longer fish the deep plunge pools, as it seems to be small fish that use them, and releasing them does not seem a viable option when they suffer the bends. I have not tried the tricks described here to deal with this problem, so I can't say how succesful they are. I do know that I see other people pull walleye and sauger from very deep plunge pools, and that those small fish, if released without any such treatment, go to feed the eagles.