Luck is an important factor in the fall when it comes to finding walleyes. It's because they can be here today and gone tomorrow. That information you got from the local bait shop can be old news if it's older than a day.

Don't use the same-colored lures in the fall. While those fire-tiger and perch patterns were the ticket a few months ago, come fall this will change to chrome/black, chrome/blue and white/chartreuse. You still want to be flexible and experiment until you discover the best color pattern, but generally I find the fish react to the shinier, more brightly colored lures in the fall.

As far as live bait, I seldom use anything other than minnows. There's something about minnows that fires up the feeding response in fall walleyes. Some anglers swear by red-tailed chubs, while others won't leave the dock without a bucket of shiners. I also like to have a couple of scoops of fatheads in a bucket for tipping jigs. Given a choice of nightcrawlers, leeches or minnows in the fall, I'll only need the minnow bucket.

The one drawback to fall fishing over summer fishing is the duration of the bite. In the summer it's not uncommon to keep a bite going for hours at a time. That's unusual in the fall. Walleyes tend to bite in sporadic short periods in the fall, and you might be catching some fish and then it's like someone threw the switch. You can still see the fish on the sonar. They haven't moved. They just quit biting. The best thing to do in this situation is go find another school of walleyes that are feeding. They don't all feed at the same time on a body of water. There are always some feeding somewhere. You just have to get lucky and find them.

Luck is an important factor in the fall when it comes to finding walleyes. It's because they can be here today and gone tomorrow. That information you got from the local bait shop can be old news if it's older than a day. That feast your buddies had a couple of days ago can turn quickly into famine. So don't count on the memories of others when you're gearing up for fall walleye fishing. Realize that you are going to have to do it all on your own. You need to sleuth out all likely locations. You need to put yourself onto active fish, and you need to fine-tune the presentation to take advantage of what may prove to be a limited bite. It's just you and the walleyes.

But, the work is worth it. No high sun frying the skin off you. No sweat puddling up in your bunched-up briefs. No personal watercraft buzzing your boat. And no bugs flying into your ears. Just a cool, crisp breeze shaking the leaves off the branches and drifting your boat over a school of those big walleyes that were suspending out of your reach just a few weeks ago. Fall fishing for walleyes is the way fishing was meant to be.