4/22/26 Lakeborn Co Walleye Report! On Fire Fishing...

What a week it has been for walleye fishing on Lake Erie folks! For those of you that have been following along you know we have been battling wind, rain and cold temperatures this year….battling is an understatement really…..we have been plagued with it! But, that has all taken a back seat this week. Temperatures averaged in the lower 70s with winds out of the southerly direction which makes it very conducive for fishing the south shore of Lake Erie. We were able to fish every day this week which is a rarity for April. 

This is our most recent Lake Erie Walleye Fishing Report from Lakeborn Co. charters.

Latest Lake Erie Walleye Report

What worked for us: 

Well we decided to switch gears a bit this week and target spawning fish on the shallow flats. This is something we do not get to do a lot but neither Kris or I had trips throughout the week so we wanted to try something different than trolling. We found there to be an abundance of spawning males in the shallows from 8’-15 foot water, we were fishing the south shore from marblehead- Muemee bay. It really didn’t seem to matter where we fished along that section of the lake it was crawling with active fish. VERY nice to see.

Limits were a daily occurrence for us most days in under an hour and we would just have fun fishing the rest of the day. Our best tactic to produce fish was casting our hair jigs down stream and popping it back along the bottom in a quick motion. The best was 6-9” hops in quick order. For those of you that may not be familiar with jig fishing Lake Erie, these spawning walleye are really aggressive protecting their spawning grounds. similar to a blue gill on its nest. Any type of movement on the bottom that is stirring up sediment really drives them crazy and will result in a bite. This fish more times than not as simple as hitting the bait to kill it and not so much to eat it. We actually do not even tip our jigs with any type of bait. 

Friday afternoon was the last day that Kris and I will be fishing together for the next week or so with our clients. We both have trips that started this weekend and we will be running most days through June. That being said we went out with a BANG in a big way. 

Friday was a blue bird day with a light wind out of the east, we decided to head out deeper and locate some larger grade of fish off of wild wings (where Kris docks his boat for the first half of the season) and we found a really nice batch of fish a few miles out in 30’ of water. These fish were very high in the water column and they were AGGRESSIVE let me tell you. Most fish were in the top 15’ of the water calm. Our first pass across them we pulled 9 nice post spawn fish in a matter of minutes. We were actually struggling between the two of us to keep up and to keep lines in the water with how fast they were getting hit. These were much larger fish than their spawning cousins. These fish were averaging in the 24-29” range. 

Best lures for us were bandits, anything chrome or gold did the damage in the clean water and blue bird day.

We will see you out there! 

Captain Matt 

Video from our Lake Erie Fishing Charter