Nelson Lake is a manmade lake, or flowage, consisting of 2,053 acres, which holds a healthy population of walleyes. While the lake has a maximum depth of approximately thirty-three feet, the average depth is roughly ten feet. The water is moderately stained and contains plenty of wood and weed cover that holds fish. Here mare a few tips to catch walleye through the seasons, spring, summer, and fall.

Before you can catch a walleye, you need to be where the walleyes are. Sometimes this can be difficult to do, so you need to track the fish consistently through spring, summer and fall. Walleye are especially hard to locate when the water temperatures hit 80 degrees and higher during the mid-summer months. Water temperatures are always an important factor when locating fish, especially on a shallow, stained water flowage such as Nelson Lake.

When searching for springtime walleyes, you should locate the warmest water, because that is where you will find the fish. Often there will be many varieties packed into these areas, such as bluegill, crappie, bass, northern and walleye, along with smaller minnows. Some areas on Nelson Lake that warm up quickly and hold fish are Log Jam Bay, Crappie Bay, and up around the areas where the Totogatic River flows into Nelson Lake.

If you have never fished Nelson Lake, bring many jigs and other tackle because there is no shortage of snags. Usually with the spring walleye, I prefer to fish with 6 to 8 pound test line, a 1/16 or 1/8 ounce jig and minnows. If you do not like to jig, you can use a slip-bobber or a plain bobber to fish. These areas of water will most likely be shallower than five feet. I also cast floating Rapala’s, shad raps, or other minnow stick type baits over structure and along shorelines. The water clarity will determine the color of the jig and lures to use. The colors I usually use are orange, silver, chartreuse and white, or combinations of these colors. But sometimes you need to experiment until you find a working color combination.

Mid-summer tactics start to come into play as water temperatures begin to warm. Fish will tend to move out of the shallow bay and shoreline areas and out to the deeper water areas. During the mid-summer pattern, I look for areas along the river channel with cover, such as sunken bogs or timber flats, which are like forests under water. The walleyes stay cool by burrowing or hovering near these heavy bog or wood locations.

I usually fish in eight to ten feet of water and will then drift, troll or anchor on these spots, using jigs or slip-bobbers tipped with still minnows, crawlers or leeches. I recommend that you try all three to see which one will work the best.

When trolling, I use the smallest shad-raps and slowly work over and around these areas. On a short cast with eight-pound test line, the shad-rap will go down around five feet. With a longer cast, the lure will go deeper. This will keep you just above the timber, although a lure retrieval device could save you some money in lost tackle. This trolling approach can be excellent, and many times will outdo the other approaches.

Fall fishing is also good, but the type of weather will determine how you will catch fish. If it stays warm, trolling will produce fish until the waters cool. Once this happens, anglers will have to work deeper water, usually jigging with minnows near the bottom.

The closer it gets to freeze-up, fish are generally deep but also tend to move shallow at times and you can find some of the bigger walleyes more active then too.