When we can’t find good-looking water, Jason Mitchell says there are times when we can still find and catch walleyes by making some adjustments.

River systems offer some of the earliest walleye fishing opportunities across the Midwest. When it comes to catching river walleyes, nothing is more important than water visibility. Heavy runoff, ice jams and snowmelt can muddy and raise the water.

When you encounter muddy water in river systems early in the year, the best advice is to try to avoid it. No doubt, muddy water filled with debris is one of springtime walleye fishing’s toughest situations. Put in the work to see if you can avoid it, but sometimes you just can’t.

During high water early in the year, don’t be afraid to get off the main channel and target backwater areas outside of the current. We often find that the visibility often improves as well in some of these backchannel locations. This slack water is often a brief opportunity when the river gets high, but fish will sometimes pile into these locations.

A back eddy or some type of current seam will make these locations better, but current isn’t always necessary. My favorite locations to look for are backwater locations with a depth of at least 6 feet next to willows or some type of brush where there is a high stem count. Think of the types of bushes or shrubs that deer would eat; that is what you are looking for. Find this in 3 to 8 feet of water with at least 6 feet of water next to it, add a little bit of a back eddy, and these locations are walleye magnets during spring high water.

When the water visibility is less than a foot, and visibility is measured in inches, don’t be afraid to go heavier on your jigs and bulk up the profile of the jig with larger soft plastics. In turbid water, one of my favorite colors is either black or dark purple. When rivers get muddy, I have had a lot of luck slowly dragging jigs upstream, or simply hanging the jigs below the boat as we Spot-Locked in place. The presentation is often simply dragging and methodical; the snap or cadence is slow and small, without a lot of snap jigging or lifting the jig off the bottom. Simply drag and hang. You could even put the rod in the rod holder.

I like to oversize the soft plastics in this situation. That requires going heavier on the jig to fish the current. Something that also works well is to combo up soft plastics with a tipped minnow or shiner. I believe the plastic adds some profile and perhaps vibration allowing fish to find it better. The minnow adds the taste/scent component that seems important at times in cold, dirty water.

We also add a lot of stinger hooks at times and find stinger hooks important with the plastic/ minnow combo. The key for stinger hooks to work is to keep them free from debris. A little trick that seems to help the tiny treble hooks on a stinger hook get through debris better is to hook the treble on the side of the minnow, instead of the top.

Something we also do a lot of when rivers run high and muddy is to anchor or Spot-Lock and basically hang jigs below the boat. It sometimes seems like our best days in these situations are when we can sit on key locations and hit waves of fish as they move by. We simply sit in one spot and run traffic.

When identifying these locations, use your side imaging. You will be able to watch the fish move through. Normally, when Spot-Locked with side imaging, you simply cast to where you see fish swimming through. But when water visibility gets poor, for some reason, I find that I must often anchor and fish vertically, right on the fish. If you see fish passing to the side, move the boat and hang the jigs over the side. When you are anchored or Spot-Locked, fish on side imaging will look like small worms crawling up across the screen.

Poor visibility and floating debris make river walleye fishing tougher in spring, but with some adjustments, you can still have a great time fishing river walleyes.

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