Stacy Barbour loves chasing walleyes in the fall. Photo by Tim Lesmeister

Lakes, rivers and reservoirs are completely different environments in the fall than they are in the summer.

For anglers, this means a change in tactics, which is difficult for many who are comfortable with their summer go-to presentations and don't want to shift gears. The fact is that it's not up to the angler to dictate an approach. It's up to the conditions they face and the necessary steps required to get a walleye to see their bait and potentially eat it. Anglers who stick to their tried-and-true summer techniques often have a difficult time finding and catching fish.

In reservoirs, those deep midlake humps and reefs that were loaded with walleyes in the summer are not very productive in the fall. The forage has moved. The same can be said for those big suspended schools of walleyes that were chasing shad out in open water. They're gone. Now the shoreline points and inside turns where there is some boulder cover or still-standing vegetation is pulling in the small fish and minnows, and you can bet those walleyes are right in there with them.

In natural lakes, walleyes move up onto shallow rockpiles or nudge weedlines in search of tullibees or minnows. If you catch the annual frog migration just right as they return to the lakes for the winter -- where they bury themselves in the mud until spring -- you can work shoreline areas in a foot or two of water with floating crankbaits at night and catch high numbers of big fish.

Current often dictates river walleye location, but now that the water is cool and the backwater oxygen levels have risen, those slackwater shorelines strewn with downed timber are places that can't be overlooked.

Water temperature is a factor that not only makes the shallower structure more attractive to the walleyes, but the turnover that was caused by the surface cooling increases oxygen levels to the entire body of water. This means if the walleyes want to go deep, they can go as deep as they want. These fish are no longer limited to the oxygen-rich water above the thermocline, because the thermocline no longer exists.

Let's look at how these factors affect what presentations we use.

Since the walleyes are spread out at every conceivable depth in lakes and reservoirs, sections of these bodies of water that were not a consideration in the hot-weather months become prime spots. Since walleyes can be found shallow, deep and everywhere in between, a technique that allows an angler to cover a potential hotspot more rapidly becomes a good option. The goal here is to find the walleyes. Once located, a change can produce more fish. Let me give some examples.

On a reservoir lake where I fish, the walleyes like to chase minnows up on the shallow rock and sandbars. These pods of minnows aren't spread out over the entire section of structure, but are concentrated in pockets. To discover the exact location of the fish I'll drift over the top of the rocks and cast a floating shad-shaped crankbait. When I catch a walleye I might make a few more casts to that spot with the crankbait, but more often I'm dropping an anchor so I can toss out a slip-bobber and minnow.