Halloween Fishing - Fall Walleyes

Well, another Halloween day of fishing.  I believe this is year 3 that my buddy Steve and I went fishing on Halloween and caught fish.  Today it was 32 degrees, snow in the air, 15-25 mph winds WSW, and the water temps were 39.4 degrees.  It rained steady over night and was 53 degrees yesterday.  
 
Today we hit a bigger lake near Duluth, and worked the deep breaks.  It was slow, the cold front that went through over night, dropped the temps 20 degrees.  The fish definitely didn't like it.  But if you were paying attention to the fishing and started close to the right stuff, you could get into the fish. 
 
The walleyes were at the bottom of the deepest breaks and points.  Just drag a jig and minnow, the fish would just grab it, pulling the skin off the minnow.  A lindy rig worked alright, but adding a stinger hook to a jig worked best.  We experimented with both and how long to give them with the bait before they committed.  After adding the stingers, we started converting more hits into fish on the line.  
 
We were using 3 inch chubs for the minnow today, the minnow had to be bigger than a crappie minnow, but we just got the sucker minnows back chewed up.  A big minnow is normally the ticket.  Another adjustment to what was needed to connect with the fish. 
 
Before adding the stingers we had a couple walleyes and pike for about 12 hits, then we added the stinger hooks to our jigs and caught as many fish as we missed, but they were still able to hit the jig and stinger without hooking up, amazing.  That's a tough bite but we handled it.  
 
Normally the fish are more agressive and feeding up for winter at this time of year, but this weather made it challenging.  Should have been there yesterday when they were feeding hard.  Maybe next week.
 
Minnesota Fishing Guide .com