Dokken: New prairie lakes make these the ‘good old days’ of North Dakota walleye fishing

My friend Bob Jensen of Grand Forks called the other day wondering if I wanted to go walleye fishing. There was a new North Dakota lake he wanted to explore before taking some grandkids fishing, and he figured a couple of extra lines in the water would help in his search for fish.

Set the hook and reel me in.

These are good times for walleye fishing in North Dakota. In fact, a case could be made that these are the “good old days” for walleye fishing in the state.

Not only for quality, but also for quantity.

In addition to the so-called “Big 3” – Sakakawea, Devils Lake and the Missouri River – numerous prairie lakes have popped up across the state since the beginning of the wet cycle in the early ’90s. North Dakota today has some 450 fishable waters, compared with 250 a couple of decades ago.

Some of these new prairie lakes once were little more than potholes but now cover a few thousand acres. The Game and Fish Department stocked perch in many of the new lakes initially, thinking walleyes take longer to grow and the lakes wouldn’t be around very long, according to Scott Gangl, fisheries management section leader for Game and Fish in Bismarck.

Once the initial perch boom subsided, the department decided to try stocking walleyes, Gangl says, since most of the lakes are loaded with fathead minnows, which are like candy to a walleye.

The resulting fast growth rates produced good walleye fishing within a couple of years, he says.

“It was around 2009 and ’10 that we started stocking more walleye, seeing how successful we were with it, and we’ve just been kind of pouring the coals to these waters ever since,” he said.

These new prairie lakes may not have the rugged beauty of a pristine lake in the Canadian Shield, but boy, do they produce walleyes.

“Our prairie lake walleye fisheries are just … you keep thinking, ‘Man, it just can’t get much better.’ And then it does almost every year,” said Paul Bailey, South Central Fisheries District supervisor for the North Dakota Game and Fish Department in Bismarck. “It’s pretty unbelievable

“We’ve got walleye at, sometimes, 16 to 18 months of age that are 15 inches – just off-the-charts growth,” Bailey said. “If you’d told me that walleye have the ability to grow that fast a decade ago, I don’t think I would have believed you until seeing it in some of our prairie lake fisheries now.”

I was talking about the prairie lakes recently with Tyler Bennett, a UND graduate student who’s working with Bailey on a research project I’ll be writing about in the near future. Bennett last summer worked as a fisheries technician in Bailey’s district.

The new prairie lakes, Bennett says, “are just like walleye farms.”

“It makes for some fun fishing because you can catch walleyes whichever way you want,” Bennett said. “Last summer, I was throwing crankbaits in like 4 feet of water and still catching walleyes.

“It’s unheard of – middle of the day.”

With that kind of buildup, you can understand my excitement at joining Jensen on a new lake.

There was only one rig – from Minnesota – parked at the makeshift access at the end of a road adjacent to a cornfield when we reached the lake on a recent Thursday afternoon. There was only a slight ripple on the water, the temperature was in the 80s and the only thing keeping the heat from being unbearable was the oh-so-slight breeze and the relentless haze from Canadian wildfires.

Not exactly prime walleye fishing conditions. On most lakes, at least.

We had no intel other than a couple of GPS coordinates Jensen had gotten from a friend who had fished the lake in the past. Out of courtesy, said lake will remain nameless, but the upside is there are dozens just like it scattered across the state.

Finding one of his GPS coordinates, Jensen steered his boat to a spot in about 12 feet of water and dropped anchor.

We never moved.

Fishing leeches below slip bobbers on one rod, and jigging with the other, Jensen and I caught probably 30 walleyes in less than 4 hours and kept a limit of fish to take home. Most were in the 15- to 16-inch size – perfect eaters. We also kept two bonus perch and released a couple of hefty pike in the high 20s- to low 30s-inch range.

The Game and Fish Department has a useful resource on its website for anglers looking for new places to fish.

The “Where to Fish” section of the website

allows anglers to look for lakes by name, by county and even by species. There’s also information on stocking, boating access, fishing piers and more.

Check it out by going to

gf.nd.gov

, clicking the

Fishing/Boating section at the top of the home page

and then clicking the

“Where to Fish/Fisheries Data” tab

under Fishing Resources.

These are the “good old days” of walleye fishing so make the best of them.