Our annual walleye sojourn took an unexpected turn last week. As a result, my winter freezer will lack an essential ingredient for fish tacos.
There is a variety of species that can fill in for walleye in the deep fryer, but as fans of Culver’s restaurants can attest, there’s really no replacement for walleye.
Sorry, you’ll have to travel to Idaho during the Lenten Season to test that theory.
The Fish Slayer, Marathon Man and I have discovered a nice little walleye hole in eastern Montana. Well, I should say the Fish Slayer found it, explored it, and using fishing smarts and sonar technology, pretty much mapped the best walleye holes in the lake.
Our usual routine involves a fairly early morning approach, catching a bushel of walleye well before lunch. We use live bait, mostly leaches but occasionally night crawlers, so it’s not the most difficult fishing. I’m glad it’s not. Walleye fishing is about putting filets in the freezer.
I know this defies current orthodoxy in which catch-and-release has attained near religious status on many waters. As far as trout on unstocked Montana rivers are concerned, it’s orthodoxy based on sound wildlife management principles.
That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with putting a few trout on ice, but where and when are important. Orthodoxy that defies reason is the organizing principle of a cult. I prefer to keep such things as far away from recreational fishing as possible.
So we headed for our favorite walleye spots and soon learned they weren’t so great, at least this August. The lake is actually a reservoir that stores irrigation water for downstream farmers. About halfway through the summer of 2021 the water level was down a good 5 feet from where it usually is this time of year.
Our walleye hotspots are mostly at 10-12 feet, but when we motored over to our favorites they were half as deep as normal. We didn’t get a strike.
So the Fish Slayer went into search mode, puttering around the lake until sonar told him we were in that 10-12 foot magic range. But these weren’t our usual holes. They were close, but we were in the upper flats of the reservoir and in that shallow water we had to move hundreds of feet to find the right depth.
That turned the fishing on its head. Things were slow, but eventually, after some experimentation, we started catching fish.
These weren’t walleye, however. They were rainbow trout. The first clue was the fight on the end of the line. The trout fooled us initially, convincing us, however briefly, that we’d discovered schools of walleye in a size class bigger than the 15-18 inchers we usually catch.
What I learned was that all things being equal, a 15-inch rainbow out fights a walleye of similar length all day long.
After boating a couple, we caught on. Where we’ve found walleye in previous Augusts, this year we were catching trout. We knew the reservoir supported a healthy population of put, grow and take stocker rainbows, and maybe even some wild fish spawned in the feeder streams that emptied into the lake. We’d just never targeted trout.
I have to say, as a fairly devoted fly fisher, it felt a little unseemly catching rainbows on squirming leeches, but I quickly got over myself. The fishing was briefly fast and furious, and the trout, just like our usual walleye, wound up in the wire fish basket hung over the gunnels.
I’m sure you could make a passable fish taco with trout, but the salmonids bring a different flavor profile to the plate. So these stocked, but wildish rainbows were headed for the smoker.
Come to think of it, smoked trout has all kinds of taco potential as well.
Rob Breeding writes and blogs at www.mthookandbullet.com.