Spinners should be dressed with night crawlers, ribbon leeches or a soft bait. If sunfish and perch are picking the back of your crawler to pieces, switch to a fake worm.

Ribbon leeches are good because they are tougher than crawlers and stand up better to panfish and weeds. Best of all, walleyes love ‘em!

Picking the weeds apart like a bass fisherman is another weedy-cover approach. Pitch jigs tipped with leeches to open pockets in the weeds. Weedless swimming jigs are outstanding jigs for pulling a leech or soft bait through and around the weeds.

Mosquito Lake’s walleyes will also be found in deeper water. Stump flats, on flats that range from 10 to 20 feet deep, hold plenty of fish. The trick to fishing the stump flats is to troll baits at a level that just occasionally bump the top of a stump. Otherwise, you’ll spend the whole day backing up to pop snagged lures free.

For deeper stumps, I like to use lead-core line to pull high-action baits. Not that you necessarily need lead-core line to reach 15- to 20-foot depths. Thin-diameter braided line can do the same, but lead core provides much more precision.

Pay out enough line to where the lure is bumping bottom, and then bring in just enough line so that it occasionally taps the top of a stump. Line-counter reels make duplicating the setup easy, provided the boat speed remains the same.

Hot, sunny days on Mosquito Lake bring out plenty of summer pleasure-boaters. But this is a big lake. If such activity gets too bothersome, stick to the north end of the lake, which has a 15-mile-per-hour speed limit. I’ve caught a lot of summertime ‘eyes on the north end at the 9- to 12-foot stump flat off Rattlesnake Island.

There is no horsepower limit on Mosquito Lake, but there are speed limits and established ski zones. Good access areas are located near the causeway. A large public access lies just south of the causeway on the eastern shore. On the north side of the causeway is a commercial landing where boat rentals, bait and ice are available.

Access on the southern end of the lake is near Mosquito State Park, where there is a multi-lane ramp and a marina.

PYMATUNING LAKE
The ODOW actually rates the walleye fishing prospect for 14,650-acre Pymatuning Lake as “poor.” In terms of overall fish numbers, I’d have to agree. Walleye recruitment has indeed been poor the past few years. Still, some younger year-classes are present. These, coupled with the remnants of older age-class fish, make it worth being on the lake this summer.

Physically, Pymatuning is quite similar to Mosquito. In fact, if someone were to blindfold you and drop you off south of the lake’s causeway, you might have a tough time figuring out which is which.

But when you take into account the walleye population, the similarity ends there. Whereas Mosquito is a good lake for numbers, Pymatuning boasts far fewer, but larger fish.

The Espyville-Andover causeway bisects Pymatuning into two halves. The northern portion of the lake is the shallower of the two. Depths there average 12 feet or so. Several islands may be found there, as well as sunken humps and stumpfields. Depths in the southern end average 16 to 18 feet or so, with the maximum depths near the dam, where the lake bottoms out a bit over 30 feet.

I’ve found three patterns to be productive on summertime ‘eyes on Pymatuning. Aggressive baits like the Hot-n-Tot are productive when trolled on lead-core line. With about three colors of lead-core line (90 feet) out, a Hot-n-Tot will run at 16 feet or so when the boat is moving about 2.5 mph, which is a good speed for warmwater walleyes.

Chrome-black is my most consistent color. Some days, the fish respond well to chartreuse-silver back Hot-n-Tots. Other baits worth trying include Wally Divers, Reef Runners and Shad Raps.