Despite the consistent cool northern wind pattern the past couple of weeks across Lake Erie, the walleye trolling bite has remained fairly consistent. Even though the bite has not been fast and furious overall, the larger average size of fish helps to make up for the sometimes long wait between bites. A wind shift to a warmer and consistent southern pattern would drastically help to improve the bite. The key for us has been to focus on trolling for "structure - oriented" walleye instead of trying to chase down "basin" fish. Areas with harder bottom and lots of contours seem to be the best bite we can get on. Places we are trolling include spots "in tight" around Island contours such as Rattlesnake and Green Islands, also over reef structures, such as Starve and Mouse Island Reefs, and even mainland contours.It seems like the cooler temps haven't allowed the fish to really school up yet over the typical basin areas that produce at this time of year. Our typical trolling set up starts with crankbaits on one side and spinner-crawler harnesses on the other side to see what the walleyes prefer. Early in the week, cranks with leads from 55-85 feet back took some fish but it became apparent that spinner rigs were outproducing cranks for us. By the weekend we ran all spinner rigs. Our best setup was running big #8 Erie ArrowHead spinner blades on a 2 oz. inline back 20-40 ft at 1.5-1.9 mph. One of the unique attributes of the Erie ArrowHead blade design is that it allows you to fish a "big thumping" size 8 blade at a much higher trolling speed without having it spin out. So were are able to pull both the big Erie ArrowHead blades and cranks together at high trolling speeds effectively. In the summer, we run these blades at 2.2 -2.5 mph while trolling both dipseys, and weighted cranks at high speeds. As for colors of blades, it really didn't seem to matter, but if I had to pick two standouts it would be "BULLGOD" and "CREEPIN' DEATH." Despite our success with the spinners, most boats were fishing cranks although I did hear boats taking fish on large spoons. So goes to show you never can tell! Fish On! www.Badmolures.com