Big river walleye just misses state record.Dick Cataldo has some advice for walleye anglers frustrated with catching small fish in the St. Joseph River.

Big ones exist. Really big ones.

Like the one he caught before daylight April 17.

Cataldo had just slipped into his waders about 4:30 a.m. and eased into the cool St. Joe waters when he made his first cast onto the gravel bar.

He pulled the Rapala Husky Jerk beneath the surface a few feet, jerked it once, then let it sit in the current.

When he attempted to twitch the suspending minnow plug again, the bait didn’t move.

“At first I thought I thought I had foul-hooked a carp because it was big and swam directly into the current,” said the 77-year-old Elkhart angler.

But when he felt the head-shaking monster at the other end of the line, he figured it was a big walleye. After a long, delicate battle – and without a net – he slid the trophy onto the shore.

Its unofficial weight was 13.476 pounds. The 30-year-old state record is 14-4.

The veteran angler uses a DNR formula that computes length and girth into weight. This fish measured 31½ inches long from the nose to the tail fork and was 18½ inches around the middle.

“It’s a pretty accurate formula,” said Cataldo, who has fished the river for bass and walleyes since he was 12 years old. “I checked the weight then turned her back into the river.”

Cataldo doesn’t keep big walleyes and he’s caught a lot of them. His previous best was a 12 pounder and he’s caught 5 others that weighed 10 pounds or more and numerous 6 to 8 pounders.

His big-fish secret?

First, he catches most of the big ones in the spring and all have come on the Husky Jerk lure, black-and-silver in color.

“I dead-stick it,” he described. “Get it beneath the surface, twitch it a couple of times, then let it sit. That’s when the strikes occur.”

Secondly, he targets eddies along shallow, gravel bars adjacent to deep water. Wading, he says, is his preferred method of fishing for them, although he will fish by boat in deeper water in the summer.

Weather is another factor. Most of his big fish have come prior to a weather change, such as a few hours before a forthcoming cold front.

“Anytime the weather is going from good to bad, you want to be fishing,” he insisted.

His tackle was a 7½-foot G Loomis spinning rod and a reel spooled with 10-pound SpiderWire superline that has a diameter of 4-pound monofilament.

A few of his 10-pound-plus have come from Michigan sections of the St. Joe, but Cataldo believes Indiana fishing is just as good.

“It’s really improved the past few years and I think there is more natural reproduction than the DNR realizes,” he offered. “I’ve caught quite a few fish less than 6 inches long in the spring. I don’t think they should stop stocking; what they’re doing is really working.”