Getting good at catching suspended walleyes, according to Courts, means getting good at finding them. That means you have to be willing to prowl the depths with one eye on the sonar until you happen upon a suspended school of tullibees that are surrounded by some hungry walleyes.

"When I find the suspended walleyes on Otter Tail," said Courts, "I send down a spinner and use a snap-weight to get the bait into the fish. The spinner sits above a nightcrawler harness, and I've had my best luck using fluorocarbon line with this setup."

The reason for the snap-weight is that you have the ability to make quick changes to cover a lot of depth ranges.

"Those tullibees can stack up in the water column, and those walleyes can be above, below or out to the side of these baitfish," said Courts. "You need to find the active, feeding fish, so you might have to cover water from 18 to 30 feet down on one pod of these baitfish. With the snap-weight you can make a pass, switch to a heavier weight and strain those depths until you find fish that are willing to hit that spinner rig."

LAKE WASHINGTON
Never one to pass up a hot walleye bite, Courts followed a tip down to Lake Washington just north of Mankato in Le Sueur County where he discovered that a lot of other anglers had picked up on the promise of finding a hungry bunch of walleyes.

"There were a lot of boats on the lake, and this was on a weekday," said Courts. "These walleyes were getting pressured but I joined the crowd on a point halfway across the lake from the boat landing."

Courts dropped a live-bait rig with a leech and had a bite within seconds.

"It was a real nice sheephead and it put up a great fight, but it wasn't what I was after," he said. "I didn't have any bigger minnows along so I stuck with my game plan, and after an hour I caught a lot of sheephead but no walleyes."

Courts decided it was time to get out the underwater camera.

"There are a lot of walleyes in Lake Washington and I figured being the middle of summer they might be pretty tightly bunched, so I went to that sunken island in the middle of the southeastern basin and began looking around the base of it."

It was a couple of hours of watching the screen and seeing a lot of sheephead, bluegills and bullheads before Courts spotted his first walleye.

"I had just dropped into 22 feet of water and there was this dip in the bottom next to an old log that was stuck in the silt, and a foot off the bottom was a walleye," said Courts. "I could see some other fish, which turned out to be walleyes just inches off the bottom."

Courts rigged a 1/8-ounce jig and tipped it with a fathead and started vertical jigging right over the top of those fish. They were hungry.

"I caught a couple dozen nice fish from 16 to 24 inches and let them all go," he said. "They were nice healthy-looking walleyes and put up a great fight. I'm not sure everyone has the patience to do a search like I did, but sometimes you have to pay your dues if your going to get lucky."

There are plenty of great walleye lakes in the state of Minnesota, and some are well-kept secrets where the walleyes only get harassed by a few anglers in the know. But if you're on one of those bodies of water where the walleyes are popular, you should be fooling them instead of letting them make a fool of you.