by Stan Fagerstrom for The Mack Attack, August 02, 2014

Attend one of the seminars presented by a well known Pacific Northwest walleye angler and you’re going to hear him ask a few questions of his audience.

If you read my previous columns you know the man I’m talking about is Doug Allen, a veteran walleye angler and a member of the Mack’s Lure Pro Staff. The questions he asks of his seminar audience are keys to the basics of his approach to walleye angling.

One of these questions goes something like this: “Have you ever heard of an expert fly fisherman heading to Yellowstone Park for a fishing adventure who didn’t endeavor to find out what the hatch was likely to be while he was there?”

Another similar question he poses is: “Would you expect an expert hunter to look for bear in a berry patch if there weren’t any berries or attempt to find deer in an acorn patch if there weren’t any acorns?”
The obvious answer to all of these questions is a definite no.

“Fishing for walleye,” Allen says, “isn’t or shouldn’t be all that different. Yet time after time you see walleye fishermen heading out with absolutely no idea of what the fish in the water they’ll be fishing are currently feeding on. They just grab a rod and reel and a container of worms and take off. That’s not going to get the job done.”
Allen says “matching the hatch” is every bit as important in walleye fishing as it is to the fly rod angler after trout. He also says it’s the primary difference between a winning walleye pro and the amateur angler who hasn’t learned that lesson.

Doug sometimes used a cork board display of Mack’s Lure Smile Blades during his seminars at outdoor shows. Allen’s display got all kinds of attention from show visitors.

What that board display enabled Allen to do was “show” as well as “tell” about the hatch-matching qualities of Mack’s Lure Smile Blades.

“My display,” Allen says, “gave me an easy way to point out the importance where both size and color are concerned for the walleye angler. With regard to size, consider sculpins. They are part of the food chain as long as they live. Whitefish, on the other hand, remain in the food chain in their early stages of life but become too large in less than two years.”

This old timer of walleye angling gives every bit as much attention to color as he does size. “If I’m fishing water that I know holds whitefish,” he says, “I’ll usually rig with a Smile Blade in the white tiger glo color because it matches the silver scales of the whitefish.”
If he’s on water that he knows is loaded with crawdads, you’ll likely find him rigging with black and orange or copper scale blades. And he wouldn’t be guessing because he’d have found out in advance what the forage fish were, when they had been spawned and anything else of importance.

So how does one go about getting this information? Allen says it’s available from fishing departments of the state in which you are fishing. It might require a call, an Internet search or a visit to a regional or state fisheries office. Whatever effort is required will be time well spent.

He points out that the well stocked library in a nearby city will likely have other information you can put to very good use. So can certain television shows and outdoor show seminars.

Much of what Doug Allen has to say regarding walleye fishing covers the same kind of territory you’ll hear experts in other fields of angling endeavors emphasize. There’s a raft of information available but it’s up to you to seek it out and then put it to work.

As Allen will testify, few walleye lash ups make this hatch-matching easier than do Smile Blades. The blades come, as his display board so nicely showed, in a variety of size and colors. If you know the details about the forage fish in the water you’ll be on, and I’ve told you where to get that information, Smile Blades let you match both size and color.

These easy spinning and lightweight blades can be easily slipped on and off a leader and you don’t have to fool around and lose a lot of time making any desired changes. It cuts way down on the time your lure’s not in the water.

That’s about the size of it. The assembly of knowledge is an important aspect whatever the endeavor. Doug Allen knows that. Pay attention to what he has shared with you in my last couple of columns and you’ll up your walleye catch.


Quit flying by the seat of your pants. Make sure you have the information that will help you catch fish before you grab your rod and reel and head out the door.

-To Be Continued-