Part 2

You can never go wrong letting the fish tell you what color lure they want and how it has to be fished to get them to grab it.

Do much fishing for elusive critters like the finicky walleye and you had better make that approach a part of your angling strategy sooner than later.

That’s exactly what the walleye expert I told you about in my previous column has been doing now for some time.  That angler is Brian Stauffer, of McPherson, Kansas.

Here's evidence that Brian Stauffer knows how to put big walleye in the boat.  He uses Mack's Lure Smile Blades to help do it.

As I mentioned in that last column, Brian and his fishing partner Nick Brumbaugh have been using Mack’s Lure Smile Blades almost exclusively for their walleye fishing for the past two years. You won’t talk walleye fishing with Brian long before you realize how much importance he attaches to using the right Smile Blade color.

Brian had been fishing for walleyes the day before I last talked to him.  Among things I asked him was if he thought his spinner blade color made much difference.  “Color,” he says, “can make a huge difference in your angling success.  Yesterday, for example, we had to use either a red or silver shade or they just wouldn’t hit.”

It’s their color that Brian thinks is one of the keys to the Smile Blades effectiveness.  “The way those blades reflect color,” he says,
“seems to imitate the scales of a fish.  It catches the eye of the walleyes we’re after.”

I started writing about fishing way back in the mid 1940s.  In the countless newspaper columns, magazine articles and Internet features I’ve done since I’ve often reminded anglers to avoid a common major mistake.  What is it?  To go on using the same approach and exactly the same lure color at the same boat speed hour after hour if they’re not getting results.

Brian is still a young man but it’s a lesson he’s already learned.  That’s why he emphasizes the importance of color change.  Changing colors, of course, means you’ve got to remove the Smile Blade you have on and replace it with a different shade.  Brian and Nick have worked out a time saving way to go about doing it.

This is a close up of the rigging Brian Stauffer uses in his search for walleyes.

“What we do,” Brian says, “is tie a Surgeon’s Loop Knot at the upper end of our leaders.  We insert the snap swivel at the end of our main line into the leader loop.  When we want to change Smile Blades we simply unsnap the leader.  We then pull off the blade we’ve been using and poke the leader loop through hole in the center of the new Smile Blade.  Then we simply slide the new blade on down in front of the bait.”

These Kansas walleye specialists are able to use this procedure because the hole in the center of the Smile Blade is big enough to allow them to pull the small Surgeon’s Knot through it to remove it and to insert another blade of a different color in its place.

At first glance this method of changing blades might not seem all that important.  That’s not how Brian and Nick see it.  They know they’re going to change blade colors until they find one the fish will hit.  When they make those changes they don’t want to mess around and take any more time than is essential.

“The way we do it,” Brian says, “saves time and you can’t catch fish without having a line in the water.  The last thing we’d want to do is mess around having to cut our leader and tie new knots.  The small Surgeon’s Knot let’s us avoid that problem.”

Stauffer will tell you much the same sort of thing about boat speed.  He says even a slight change can make a major difference.  “We were out early once,” he says, “and the fishing was really slow.”  “We had gone all the way down to a boat speed of .8 per mile trying to interest the obviously inactive fish.  When the sun got up we increased our boat speed to 1.2 and 1.3 miles.  We immediately started catching fish.”

It’s always a pleasure to have opportunity to probe the thoughts of someone like Brian Stauffer.  He’s a dedicated and thoughtful angler.  I won’t be the least bit surprised if we hear a good bit more about him in Kansas professional walleye fishing circles in the future.

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