Blue Walleye

[Early Riser]

Cirrus lake on in northwest Quetico is known for a population of blue walleye. I am sure there are other Quetico lakes with a number of these fish. Anyone know of any others?

[Coldfeet]

I've caught them in Smoothrock Lake in northern Ontario while on fly-in fishing trips. I've been going up there every year with my brothers and my dad for about 6 or 7 years now and we'll be going again in April. We catch them every year. Some years it seems like 90% of what you catch are blue, and other years it's more like 50%. I don't think they get too big though. The biggest one we've seen was only about 22 or 23 inches and we've caught many walleyes in the 27 to 32 inch range while there, but none of them were blue. Mostly were there for the Lakers. We spend about an hour a day on walleyes to catch our dinner. The walleye fishing there is so good it's actually sickening. Beleive it or not, but you'll get bored not from sitting in the boat with no action, but from catching so many that it becomes routine. It's fun for about a day or two, then you want to go catch something else. Last time up I caught a black walleye. It did not have even a speck of any other color. Even the belly was pure black. I almost thought that was cooler than any of the blues.

[Harmonica Bear]

I know we have caught blue walleyes, or walleyes that had a very unmistakable blue tint, on Kawnipi Lake in the Quetico.

[Chad711]

Black ehh? Why no pictures!

[FreeFlySpy]

I was on a back country fishing trip in Canada and one of the group caught a trophy walleye. Wanted to mount it so we wrapped it in a white wet towel. The towel turned blue. I always thought it was blue/green algae that turned walleyes blue? Depends on the water.

[Cheers]

acording to a fish biologist the blue coloring is from the slime and that it is not a sub species just a resesive gene, blue walley offspring can be golden

[Chad711]

So wipe the slime off, its normal.. I dont get it

[RandyR]

We were fishing on North Wind Lake in Ontario last summer (near Lake Nipigon) and caught quite a few of what the locals claim to be Blue Walleye. They were striking in appearance and definitely different than the standard colors. In fact, North Wind has both types, it seems to me if it were just some kind of random color variation it would eventually disappear. They tended to run smaller and the general body shape was more slender. They were a dark silver blue on top, light silver on the sides and almost pure white bellies, very pretty fish. There were virtually no markings on the sides, just a solid silver color. They also tended to be significantly deeper than the normal colored walleyes we caught, and we almost never caught both types in the same spot. We are going back there this summer and I will try to get some good digital pictures and post them. We didn't quite realize they may have been unique and the pictures I have don't show them very well. A mystery perhaps?

[dhomuth]

When I was a guide for the Explorer Scouts in the early 60's, we used to catch blue walleyes in Quetico lakes commonly. They were intermingled with the other walleyes.