When it comes to unique destinations for walleye fishing, few are as unique as North Dakota’s Devil’s Lake. While this body of water has always been North Dakota’s largest natural lake, in the past decade it has more than doubled in size and with that has become one of the most interesting and diverse walleye fisheries in the country. This is definitely one lake that a walleye angler can go nuts on trying to find the best pattern on a given day, because it seems at one time or another all techniques will work!

From trolling open flats to casting cranks in the flooded timber, Devil’s Lake walleyes can at times be a handful to figure out.

When I rolled in to the town of Devil’s Lake for a TV shoot a couple seasons back, it was mid May and the word was the best walleye bite was happening in the flooded timber. Now with all the flooding and rising water Devil’s Lake has experienced over the last several years, an angler is faced with miles of flooded cover, most of it the form of trees. All of the flooded wood was once shelter belts and groves of trees, but have now proven to be very popular areas for walleyes to hang out..

I hooked up with friend and fellow PWT angler Jim Carrol for this trip. Jim calls Devil’s lake his home water and I was confident he’d know the right game plan to make this shoot a successful one. Jim said the bite had been really good and the casting bite was going good. I was pumped because this could make for some exciting video. I was envisioning having a blast casting cranks for walleyes, then throw in the element of casting amongst the trees and this could really get exciting. One problem however … a common one when you roll in to shoot a TV show it seems … the weather was threatening to throw us a curve ball. And it did.

Over night a nasty cold front rolled through dropping the water temps five degrees. Now that may not sound like a huge change, but when it comes to walleyes, it really is. The next morning as we launched the boat we were faced with cool temps and blue bird skies; text book cold front conditions. This was going to dramatically change the way we’d have to fish for these fish. Forget about fishing fast and covering water. Now the name of the game would be “How Slow Can You Go?”

So now we needed to come up with a presentation that would allow us to target walleyes in flooded wood and do it as slow and methodical as possible. The solution was to go with slip bobbers. Most of us as anglers started off our fishing staring at a bobber.

Whether as kids, or adults, there are few things that get the heart pumping more than seeing that bobber twitch, then sink out of site. Slip bobber fishing is a bit more technical, but still has that “Bobber Down” excitement factor that the old red and white clip-on bobber fishing gave us as kids. The advantage to slip bobbers is that they slide on the fishing line and use a bobber stop, in this case a knot of thread tied on the fishing line, that can be set to what ever depth you want the bait to be at and still cast the rig out.