Since it "tis the season", the start of saugeye and sauger season that is, I thought I'd share a little bit of what lil bit I know about fishing for these toothy critters in rivers. There are three ways that most of the best saugthing fishermen I know use ninety plus percent of the time.
First of all, you young guns out there at midnight in the middle of winter in insulated coveralls throwing a minnow plug may not know it but you pretty much owe the technique or at least the spread of it all across the country to one guy, Doug Stange. 30 years ago Doug and a band of hearty anglers first began fishing big minnow plugs at night for big walleye and writing about it in In-Fisherman. (actually about half of what we do as anglers in the US we owe in one way or another to In-Fisherman but that's a whole nother story..)
Pretty much the way those guys fished 30 years ago is still exactly the way you want to today, the only thing that has changed is the tackle has gotten a whole lot better. Go to your local tackle store and buy yourself a suspending rogue to start. A big one. That's enough to start with though if you want to get completely set up buy a selection of long minnow plugs in both floating and suspending. Things like Rapala husky jerks and shadow raps, Rebel minnows, Bass Pro XPS minnow, Cabela's mean eye jerkbait, Yozuri crystal minnows and on and on. Long skinny minnow plugs all, and all of them big. At night you want a lure a big saugthing can see, can feel with it's lateral line and can strike. Notice none of these run very deep. The idea is that at night when sauger, saugeye or walleye (saugthings from here on out) are in the mood to feed they move up shallow. Not all, but at least aggressive active fish. Even in the dead of winter when your line is freezing in the guides you can often catch big fish up shallow at night. Often our rivers get very very clear in the coldest weather. Usually the clearest they get all year and this makes the saugthings even more nocturnal. Like I said all you really need to start is a suspending rogue but who wants just one lure when they can buy dozens. But there are a whole lot of old farts out there who will tell you who wants to buy dozens of different minnow plugs when you can buy dozens of rogues instead. The key is where you throw that minnow plug more than anything else. The best places to try are rocky banks below lowhead dams and places where the river is constricted like around bridge abutments, big gravel bars, wing dams etc. Also try rocky banks at the mouth of feeder creeks, the glance structures off of big dams, basically anything that has current and rocks or concrete. Now, I don't care if the box says your supposed to jerk and pause or retrieve and pause or do any of a dozen things that might be triggering cold weather bass into biting, DON"T DO IT! Throw the thing out there and retrieve it back real slow and steady. Every time, dang it. You can catch them in different ways but over the course of a year you are going to catch a lot more fish. At night, slow and steady wins the race. I know a couple guys that catch big saugs by standing along the wing walls at the base of dams and just fish their minnow plug in place on a short line just holding it there and letting it swim in place against the current.
Another technique for catching winter saugs is using soft plastics on a jig head. Things like paddletail swimbaits, the curly shad and grubs. These enable you to cover all the water you cannot reach with the minnow plug. Deeper eddies below lowhead dams, the bases of wingdams and rubble walls as well as water that is too swift for minnow plugs like the fast current seams below lowhead dams or even right in the hydraulic jump at the base of the dam itself. Saugthings are coldwater fish and can often be found actively feeding in swifter current right in the dead of winter. A plastic swimbait also lets you probe deeper slower water for inactive fish as well as fish for deeper fish during the day. As for jighead weight, I try and match the weight of the jig head to the force of the current. You want a weight that lets you comfortably swim the jig back slowly just off the bottom. Saugfish, especially in winter are the most piscivorous fish I know of, they aren't poking around the bottom looking for hellgrammites or taking moth off the surface or any of a dozen other things you might find a bass doing. They are, at least as adults, strictly after baitfish. Which is why the most effective retrieve is to swim the bait back to you slowly off the bottom rather than jig or hop it on the bottom, your imitating a minnow. The other retrieve is to let the jig sweep down a seam of current on a tight line like a helpless minnow being swept along. Again you want to match the weight of your jighead to the speed of the current more than anything else. Saugs do not suspend nearly as much as walleye and strongly relate to the bottom so again you want that jig close to bottom. Most of time in the medium sized rivers I fish the most I'll use a 1/4 ounce jighead more than any other, and unlike smallmouth fishing, I'll use a 3/8 more than a 1/8 ounce jighead. Mostly because some of very best saugfishing occurs below dams and a 3/8 ounce head is sometimes needed in the swifter reaches below the dam. I am perfectly comfortable heading out saugfishing just about anywhere with a bigger four inch grub and some curly shads and a few assorted jigheads in a baggie stuffed in my winter jacket and no other lures. They pretty much let me fish effectively anywhere I'm going to find saugs and are my go to lure. If I'm fishing the Ohio River I'll actually often go smaller on lure size than I will in our other rivers andfish a three inch grub because in the Ohio your most likely just going to find sauger which is a smaller fish than the saugeye. At night and at anytime in rivers that contain saugeye I find myself using a bulkier bait like a curly shad, a paddletail or a bigger grub.
A third very effective technique for catching saugfish is on a jig and minnow. The best setup is a leadhead jig with a small treble tied on a two inch long trailer of braid. I'll usually take a three inch smoke metalflake grub or a clear with silver grub and put it on the jighead and then pinch the tail off. Next I hook a minnow up thru the bottom of the mouth and out one nostril on the jig hook and then lightly hook the minnow on the treble right in front of the tail. You can catch fish on a jighead without the trailer but you will catch many more with the addition of the treble hook. Without it a lot of minnows are simply knocked off the hook without getting the fish getting hooked. This is probably the mot effective presentation in deep water like below the big dams on the Ohio. The big disadvantage is that you are messing with bait and getting your hands wet when it's cold outside. In the dead of winter with a stiff wind blowing up the river this can be a very big deal, trust me.
So how do you tell the difference between these three often very similar fish? Well I'm just going to copy and paste that from the ODNR website. After all who better to tell the differences than the biologists who actually raise and stock the things.
"Saugeye are intermediate in appearance between their two parent species, the sauger and walleye
. The best character to look at for identifying this hybrid is the dark bars or oblong vertical spots between the spines of the first dorsal fin. The membrane of this fin in the unmarked areas is often a dusky color and not as clear as that of a sauger. A large dusky spot at the rear base of the first dorsal fin is usually visible on a saugeye but not as clearly defined as it is on a walleye. Saugeye have dark laterally oblong blotches on their sides but they tend to be smaller than those of a sauger. Saugeye also have white tips on the lower part of the tail and anal fins. These are more defined than the very thin light colored margin of a sauger but less defined than the large white tips found on a walleye"
Notice all the "often and usually" sometimes even the experts cannot be sure just by looking and have to perform genetic testing to be sure. All this uncertainty bothers me a bit because a few years ago I landed a saugfish in the Little Miami that was longer by a half inch than the state record sauger. In all outward appearances it looked exactly like what a sauger is "supposed" to look like. It was midsummer and the fish was obviously much lighter than the state record which was as round as watermelon and full of eggs so I released it. So though I'll never know for sure there might be a state record swimming in the Little Miami. The world record saugeye if I remember right was caught thru the ice in Montana and looked exactly like a walleye so who knows. Though stocked saugeye are born in the lab they are a regular natural occurrence as well. Everywhere that walleye and sauger meet,mostly in big rivers like the Ohio something like 4 or 5% of the natural population is a saugeye.
