Fishing a classic natural lake near my home I often find the walleyes in the fall to favor the base of a deep hump. You can often pick these tightly packed schools of walleyes out on the sonar, but I want to key on the group that's biting. I send down a 1- to 2-ounce bottom-bouncer with a short-spinnered snell on it. This rig gets down quick and lets me move from one school of walleyes to the next to search out the more active fish. When I find a group of biters, I'll keep the boat right over the top of them and send down a 1/4- or 3/8-ounce jig and minnow, and vertical jig it right in their face. These walleyes can be anywhere from 40 to 60 feet deep on the bottom edge of that hump.

One of my favorite fall river spots is where the current brushes up to the entrance to a backwater area. Walleyes will hang right on the edge of these eddies and pick off the minnows moving into the slack water. Just position the boat in the current and let it drift you downstream while you cast a jig and minnow into the still water and retrieve it out to the current. A bright 1/4-ounce leadhead jig tipped with a fathead minnow works great for this.

Most anglers will move back out to the channel to find walleyes if they aren't on a backwater eddy. Not me. I often move right into the backwater and work any shoreline cover that's available. This is often downed timber. You can move the boat right to this cover and pitch a 1/8-ounce jigged tipped with a fathead right into it. Those small walleye jigs with the weedguard work great in this stuff. If you're working some cover and see a bunch of minnows break the surface by some branches, get over to that spot fast. There are walleyes in there feeding, and that's what's spooking those minnows.

On a lot of lakes and reservoirs in the fall you just can't beat the night bite. Big walleyes will move right up to the shorelines at night and sit in just a foot or two of water herding up minnows, crayfish and frogs to feast on. This is the perfect situation for a floating shallow-diving crankbait like the Rapala. The trick here is to use just enough retrieve speed to elicit a little wobble. You only need to have that lure running just a few inches to a foot below the surface to generate bites.

If you're not catching walleyes in the shallow zone at night, don't hesitate to tie on a deeper diver and motor-troll a weedline or the top and edges of a rockpile. Walleyes will move to the tops of the reefs to feed, but their movements also have them on the edges and at the base of this same structure. Sometimes it just takes a faster-moving minnow imitator to wobble by to get them to react.