Aug 31, 2008 By Rod Schoener 7 min read

Local tournament fishermen Mark and Rich Fike of Farmington finished third in the most recent Masters Walleye Circuit event on Lake Erie out of Dunkirk, N.Y. They just missed qualifying for the World Championship with a two-day total of 52.21 pounds, as they caught four walleye weighing 20.36 pounds the first day and a limit of five the second weighing 31.85 pounds.

Besides taking third place, they managed to get a share of the lunker pot both days with walleye weighing 9.54 and 5.4 pounds.

Mark laments the fact that they could have qualified for the World Championship if they had fished the Saginaw, Mich., qualifier, but they had to pass on it, as he couldn’t get off work.

“We would have had enough points to qualify for the World Championship if we had fished Saginaw, Mich.”

Last year they qualified and fished the World Championship at Dundee, Mich., where they finished 37th.

Mark said of last year’s World Championship, “We did real well on the first two days and bagged a good limit on the third. There was so much water to cover. The guys who won it had six teams working together to find fish. We finally got on fish, but we struggled the first two days.”

Mark said that they went up a week early to do some prefishing at Dunkirk and ran into some bad weather.

At Dunkirk, the Fikes worked with two other area teams.

“Ryan Reiger from Elizabeth and Greg Knopick from Warren did real well. They finished fourth, while Robert Stone and John Prinkey of Markleysburg had mechanical problems and finished 57th.”

Reiger and Knopick landed five walleye weighing 21.09 pounds on the first day and five more on the second weighing 29.88 pounds, while Stone and Prinkey caught three walleye weighing 8.63 pounds on the first day and didn’t fish the second.

Mark said, “It was a 22-mile run down to the fish. The first day we went to the main school. That is where we made a mistake. We caught one 8.5-pounder and picked up another, but it came unbuttoned 30 feet from the boat.

“We then went to another spot and caught one right away. With that 8-pounder that came off, we probably could have won.

“The second day we went to the main school and skirted the outside edge. Only five teams weighed in more than 30 pounds, and no team weighed in over 30 pounds both days.

“We knew the fish were out there and kind of scattered on the edge of the main school, and we had to re-locate them. Once we got on them, we beat them up pretty good.”

The Fikes were also working with the team of Bob Henton and Lance Connor of Spartansburg in Somerset County. They finished in second place, boating limits of 32.09 and 24.40 pounds.

Fike noted that they were pulling Dipsy Divers and crawler harnesses most of the time, while using ChatterSticks, which resemble a baitfish lure with blade on its nose.

“The blade gives it a lot of action,” Mark said. It is intended to imitate a fleeing fish. After we present it, we drop the speed down to 1.8 mph and then speed up to 2.0 or 2.2 mph. The action excites the walleye and makes them mad. It gives them something to go after.”

Most of the walleye were concentrated 50 to 60 feet down. At 75 and 80 feet down, guys were hooking into some really big lake trout.

Rieger caught a 35-pound lake trout and put it back. “I told him to keep it and have it mounted, as he might never catch another that big,” Mark said.

“On the first day we pulled off the fish. We could have easily been out of the tournament, but we kept our heads and worked the program we knew would work.”

Mark explained that they had to run on the outside of the baitfish. “When the walleye were feeding, they were pushing the baitfish toward the surface, so you had to look like one (a baitfish) out of place. If you put your lure right inside the bait school, the walleye would not touch it,” Mark said.

The walleye were in migration. Mark said, “”On the first day we fished in the main school. We had some decent fish, but we wanted to locate a breakaway school of larger ones. We got on them, and we lost them. It was my mistake. I learned a lesson. Just stay with the main school and try to find the bigger fish within it.”

While prefishing one day, they had a stringer weighing 36 pounds. If we could have located them again, we could have made a big charge, but things didn’t work out that way.

“It was my decision to break off from the main school, and it didn’t work out. We kept our heads in the game and caught 28 walleye the second day. We were able to upgrade enough to catch over 30 pounds.

“We had the fish figured out. We just had to find the right school.”

Mark said that he kept beating himself up after the first day, noting that his brother Rich kept them in the game because he never gives in. They just had to work that much harder the second day to overcome the deficit.

Knowing that he made a choice that may have cost them the lead, Mark said, “You’re up tight because you know you can be out of this thing, and you think hard about what you have to do to get back into it.”

I asked Mark if they were up tight prior to the start of the tournament, and if it affected their sleep the night before it began.

“I was pretty exhausted, so sleeping wasn’t an issue. When you hit the bed, you’re out. However, Richie woke up early and couldn’t get back to sleep.”

Mark explained that they had a lot of lake to cover in a short period of time. Rich had fished there before, but it was new to Mark.

They went up a week early to prefish, but lost a couple of days due to foul weather.

The fish are usually farther north and east this time of year, but other fishermen pointed out to them that the fish were a month behind schedule this year, so they had to look a some maps to figure out where they would be.

During the migration, the walleye follow the baitfish, which got warmwater-locked near Ashtabula, Ohio, delaying the normal migration.

“We went all the way to the Pennsylvania line searching for fish,” Mark said. “Once we found the baitfish and the schools of walleye, we began to fine tune our technique.”

Mark said that the weather was favorable both days of the tournament. “The lake was pretty fishable. It was not hard running. While prefishing we ran into four- to six-footers, and one rogue wave completely swept over the bow and nearly turned the boat into a submarine.”

Mark and Rich aren’t planning to fish any more national events this year, but are looking forward to the local Yough Walleye Association’s championship series, which gets under way Sept. 21 at the Youghiogheny River Reservoir.

The second event is scheduled for Deep Creek Lake on Oct. 5, and the third will take place on the Ohio River with boats scheduled to launch from the South Side launch.

The series will conclude with a two-day event. It begins Nov. 1 at Deep Creek and concludes the following day (Nov. 2) at the Youghiogheny River Reservoir.

Outdoor Editor Rod Schoener can be reached on line at rschoener@heraldstandard.com