Centerville is also lean on structure, which is the likely reason the fish aren't prone to bunching up in big schools. On many lakes if you catch a walleye, you know there are going to be more in that spot. Not on Centerville.

But these drawbacks shouldn't stop anglers from taking advantage of the great opening-day walleye fishing they will find on Centerville. There are a lot of walleyes in this lake and with the right presentation you can catch them.

The right presentation on Centerville is not the live-bait rig and this gets a lot of walleye anglers in trouble because in most cases that is their go-to technique. A live-bait rig isn't going to allow anglers to cover enough water quickly enough to catch a mess of walleyes. That requires a different approach.

If the weather conditions point to an aggressive or even neutral bite, then the crankbait is the best option. This lure can be trolled or cast while drifting and this means the lure gets in front of a lot of fish.

If the bite is light, then tie on a bottom-bouncer with a spinner rig on a short snell and use your electric motor to pull the bait instead of a noisy gas motor that is capable of spooking the fish.

For more information, call Larry's Live Bait at (651) 777-1731.

Boats will stack up at the narrows but there are a lot of other great places to fish. The entire west shoreline of the southern basin is a great place to troll. If you have never used lead-core line before, then Madison on opening day is a good time to learn.

Walleyes will be spread out all over that rubble/sand/rock shoreline, so you want to cover all of the depth zones. This is best done S-trolling a crankbait on lead-core line.

Lead-core line is actually easy to use. It comes in colored segments with each color of lead core 10 yards, or 30 feet. For each color you let out, that crankbait will run 5 to 6 feet deeper. Two colors will be around 10 to 12 feet deep. Three colors will be between 15 and 18 feet down. It doesn't matter what style of crankbait you're using, the more lead core you let out, the deeper the lure runs.

On Madison you can S-troll from 10 to 20 feet deep, adjusting the line out as you go shallower to deeper and back. You can keep the crankbait near the bottom where the fish are. The trolling passes are nice and straight, and if you do find a depth range that is consistent to where the walleyes are positioned, you can key on that zone.

For more information, call Lake Sports at (507) 243-3838.

Even though the midlake structure is the magnet that attracts the hordes of walleye anglers, the entire east shoreline is a solid option for techniques that cover water faster. This would include a long-line trolled crankbait or a heavy bottom-bouncer in front of a spinner rig. Sometimes all that boat traffic on the popular structure will push the walleyes into different areas and it's the anglers who try something different in another location that will catch walleyes on opening day on Buffalo.

For more information, call H&H Sport Shop at (320) 963-3818.

Most of the angling effort was directed at the points and inside turns where a jig-and-minnow would be pitched up into 15 feet of water and dragged back out into 22 feet. There was some grass and remnant coontail that the jig would get hung up on occasionally, but most of the time when the jig would hesitate it wasn't a weed - it was a walleye.

For more information, call Early Bird Bait and Tackle at (218) 847-9038.