7/28/24 Perch & Walleye Report

Being pretty new to this, I wanted to see if I could catch walleye in late July. I figured I would have to chase them to the east where they have deeper, cooler water. I was going to go to the weather buoy from Vermillion but looking at the NOAA chart, the weather buoy isn't any deeper than the near east side of Kelly's. So I launched at Mazurik with my navigation lights on and started fishing about half way up the east side of Kelly's in 48 fow. We had 2 bandits, 2 small stinger spoons, and 2 crawler harnesses. I just hoped I had enough snap-weight and enough feet back to get down to the fish. We did mark them regularly over there.
After half an hour, about 8 charters flew past us to the north and east, disappearing into the sunrise.
We trolled north, following a 48' channel south of Kelly's Island Shoal that eventually wrapped around the east of the shoal, and then north of it. We reached the north of the shoal after a couple hours. By then, we had caught four walleyes - 14", 15" and two 16". And a couple nice eater-sized tasty drum. Bandits and worms did best. The spoons only got 1 drum and 1 white perch.
Then, north of the shoal, we got an 11" perch on a bandit. So we quit trolling and started perching there, north of Kelly's Island Shoal. But we got nothing there on minnows with spreaders, except a drum that was too big to eat, another white perch, and a gobie.
We went back to the south and east of the shoal and trolled some more but got nothing else. So we took a lunch break. At 2:30pm, we tried perching SE of Rattlesnake in 31 fow. We got 8 pretty quick, mostly 9s and 10s. Then we joined a dozen other boats perching north, east, and southeast of Green but only picked up 1 there. Then we called it a day.