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By Stan Fagerstrom
Part 1
Are you interested in taking part in walleye tournaments?
More and more fishermen around the country are giving an affirmative response to that question. Listen up, partner. I’m fixin’ to share a few thoughts from a talented walleye angler. He’s not your ordinary catch one now and then type of guy. He’s an individual who has already won more than $70,000 in tournament dollars this year alone.
The man I’m talking about is Terry Wilson, of Powell, Wyoming. Terry is a full time competitor on the Professional Walleye (PWT) Trail. Last year this 50 year-old Wyoming walleye specialist retired from the oil fields where he had worked for the past 25 years.
Wilson turned pro angler in 1999. He’s been hammering that elusive critter we call the walleye ever since. Among other things, Terry is a valued member of the Mack’s Lure pro staff.
What does it take to become a consistent winner when it comes to competitive fishing for walleye? The way Terry Wilson went about winning the last tournament in which he participated provides some of the answers.
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| Want to know how it feels to win a major walleye tournament? This picture provides an answer. The happy guy pictured is Terry Wilson, a Mack's Lure pro from Wyoming. Wilson had just won the Professional Walleye Trail Tournament staged on the St. Mary's River in Michigan. |
That tournament, which Terry Wilson, won was the PWT Tournamentstaged on Michigan’s Saint Mary’s River. Wilson won that tournament with 48.61-pounds of walleye. Those fish, especially on the first day, didn’t come easy.
“The first day the fish were holding around rock piles that were located in water only 10 to 12-feet deep,” Terry says. “Besides that, the water was extremely clear. We had only five bites all day. We caught each of the fish that hit and wound up with 13.6-pounds of walleye.”
That brief run down doesn’t really tell the full story of how Wilson managed to come up with those five fish despite facing extremely difficult conditions. Let’s look more closely at how he got the job done.
“There turned out to be a couple of keys,” the Wyoming pro says. “One was that I used a planer board to get my bait rig out away from the boat. In that clear shallow water there was just no way we could get hits if our baits were straight behind the boat. We used in-line sinkers and the planer boards to keep our nightcrawler rigs where they needed to be.”
Wilson says the length of line used between the planer board and his ‘crawler rig was also extremely important. “If we used much more line than that,” he says, “we’d have been constantly hanging up in the rocks where the fish were holding.”
Get to visit with Terry and you’ll discover that’s still not the full story. As I’ve already mentioned, he had only five hits all day long. He’s convinced he wouldn’t have got the last two bites that filled out his limit if he hadn’t been using just the right spinner blade ahead of his worm rig.
“I’d been using a metal spinner ahead of my worm rig,” Wilson says. “I looked at the way the afternoon sun was reflecting off the water. I figured that my favorite color in a Mack’s Lure Smile Blade might be my best bet to trigger more strikes.”
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| Wyoming walleye pro Terry Wilson shows the winner's trophy and one of the fish that helped him win it. Besides that trophy, he walked away with $64,000. |
Terry’s planning turned out to be just right. He rigged up with a small Smile Blade in the goldfish scale pattern, a blade he has found to be especially effective in his quest for walleye.
“I’m convinced,” he says, “ the small goldfish scale Smile Blade gave us just enough sparkle to trigger two more strikes. I don’t think we would have had our five fish limit if we hadn’t used it.”
As I’ve mentioned, Wilson and his amateur partner wound up with 13.6-pounds of walleye at the first day weigh-in. That weight gave Terry a solid position from which to do battle over the final two days. Watch for the next issue of this column. I’ll detail how Terry Wilson went about poking $64,000 into his pocket when he topped all contenders when the Michigan PWT Tournament was over.
Finally, if you want to know how this money-winning Mack’s Lure Pro feels about Smile Blades---I can tell you. He says they’re tops. In my next column I’ll also share some of his thoughts about the best way to use them.
Watch for that column beginning Sept. 30.
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