What does fall turnover do to walleye fishing?
Turnover — the week or two when a stratified lake's cooling surface water sinks and the whole column mixes — is the most honest excuse in walleye fishing. The mixing erases the temperature and oxygen boundaries that had been organizing fish, drags murky, low-oxygen bottom water through the column, and scatters both bait and walleye lake-wide; catch rates genuinely crater. The playbook is avoidance: fish rivers and shallow, wind-mixed lakes that never stratified and never "turn over," or hop to lakes of a different size and depth, since turnover staggers across a region by days or weeks. On the affected lake itself, the recovery is the reward — once the water clears and stabilizes at cool, uniform temperatures, the fall regrouping bite comes on hard.
The full story
This answer is one piece of a longer lesson — setups, diagrams and the reasoning behind it.
Same topic, other species
- Why does crappie fishing fall apart during fall turnover? — Crappie
- How does fall turnover affect muskie fishing? — Muskellunge (Muskie)
- Does fall turnover mess up perch fishing the way it does bass? — Yellow Perch
- Does fall turnover shut pike down like it does bass? — Northern Pike
- What does fall turnover mean on a trout lake? — Trout (Rainbow · Brook · Lake)