Helena Montana's Jake Monroe and Jeff Ingram: What Makes Them So Successful at Walleye Tournament Fishing?
It’s one thing to be good at catching walleye. It’s another thing entirely to be so good that you win Team-of-the-Year, win the Iron Man Award and tie each other for Angler-of-the-Year on the Montana Walleye Circuit. That’s exactly what the duo did for the 2023 tournament year, while compiling one of the most consistent tournament tallies on record.
Giant Walleyes Like This Are a Normal Catch for Ingram and Monroe--Thus Their Tournament Success!
The Montana Walleye Circuit is a 4-event grind with anglers counting their top 3 finishes for points combined toward Angler of the Year awards. Ingram and Monroe were so consistent that their worst finish would have been a season topper for most anglers. Get this. They started the season with a 94+ pound bag for the Crooked Creek tournament. That’s a 9.4 pound average for their 10 best fish that weekend! Amazingly, that was “only” good enough for 4th place.
The second tourney of the year the guys redeemed themselves from more than a decade of top ten finishes at Fresno Reservoir by winning the event outright. Next on the tour was the Canyon Ferry Walleye Festival where Monroe and Ingram plucked enough walleyes to secure the third place check. By the time the final event at Tiber came around, they had already locked up the Team-of-the-Year title and had just one other angler with a mathematical chance to elbow them out of the Angler-of-the-Year spot. But a solid 5th place finish at Tiber iced the titles of Angler-of-the-Year as well as the Iron Man team award for the top score for all 4 tourneys combined.
For the season, that’s 4th, 1st, 3rd and 5th which is a very solid level of consistent fishing! So what’s the trick? Some special new lure? Advanced electronics? Top-shelf rods and reels? Better boat layout? Certainly, lures, sonars, gear and boat design matter but their key is something totally different and seldom discussed in the fishing media. Their biggest difference-maker is COMPLETE CONFIDENCE IN EACH OTHER!
That may sound sappy but hear me out on this. Most of us presume that successful tournament teams do their damage by dialing in the bite and then scoring top finishes by following a dialed-in formula to the “T.” That’s not what Ingram and Monroe do! During prefishing in advance of each tourney, they spend their time narrowing down the zone or zones they plan to fish. Seldom is their success tied to one spot…They do what other tournament teams do—they find the areas that are holding the biggest average size of fish. But here’s where they diverge from most other tourney teams. Instead of narrowing down to just one lure or one color or one bait, they trust each other to play their own hunches to catch the fish.
Ingram Shows Why Prefishing is a Major Part of the Tournament Grind
So, while many tourney teams throw the same jig with the same plastic body…or troll the same exact lure on all 4 rods or some other version of narrowing the tackle, these guys each fish their own favored gear. Ingram will be using his own favorite plastic body on his jigs, while Monroe goes with his own “confidence” baits. And when they get on one of those killer Glide bait bites, you’ll find one using a metallic Shiver Minnow and one using a glow version. Sometimes you’ll even find them casting completely different presentations…one throwing a lure while the other throws bait.
This is unique in that here are two national-caliber anglers who can work so effectively while playing their own hunches. And trusting that their partner’s skills at deciding what to use are equal to their own. They seldom second-guess each other. Commonly, one has the hot hand at any given time and their partner doesn’t automatically switch over to the hot bait of the moment. As we’ve all experienced when recreational fishing, one lure or color or presentation is the hot ticket for an hour or two, but it often evolves over the course of the day. So Monroe and Ingram are patient enough to let one partner have the hot stick this hour and the other takes over as the hot stick the next hour. It makes sense, but it’s also pretty unusual for a tourney team not to copy each other all day.
Monroe At the "Measure Boat" with a Couple Dandy Tournament 'Eyes
Do you trust your boat partner to make whatever decisions they need to make? Would you still trust that boat partner if several thousand dollars were on the line? Jake and Jeff’s trust and confidence in each other helps them catch more fish by having a more diverse set of offerings. Note that neither tends to choose crazy approaches or weird colors or something like that. They do the norms better than the others because they work together at a broader game plan than most other teams.
Before talking about what these guys do for technical superiority, let’s debunk the myth: IT’S NOT ALL DONE WITH FORWARD FACING SONAR! I know, some of you have seen their tourney boat with three separate forward facing sonar units running on both the Lowrance and Garmin platforms (and 3 separate 16” Lowrance HDS screens, a 12” ‘Bird Solix AND a 12” Garmin for their Livescope). And absolutely, Monroe and Ingram are extremely capable running their forward facing sonars. But their lone tourney victory this year was at Fresno Reservoir where they barely even used the live-action sonar--other than during prefishing to show them the edges of weedbeds as well as to find schooled baitfish.
And perhaps that’s the lesson we can pull from their success. Own and be skilled with the top technology of the day. But ALWAYS focus on catching fish rather than focusing on operating your equipment! Forward facing sonar is phenomenal technology but it doesn’t catch the fish for you!
What does catch fish for these guys? One thing for certain…glide baits are very important. Glide baits like the Moonshine Lures Shiver Minnow; the Acme Hyper Rattle, Jigging Raps and a host of other similar heavy jigging lures.
Glide Baits for Tournament Walleye Fishing--You've Just Gotta Have 'Em!
Almost 5 years ago I wrote an article that ran in Fish Tales that asked,
Surely, you can learn to better fish the Jigging Rap this summer? You’ve been experimenting with Jigging Raps and Shiver Minnows, right? If not, I just don’t understand. No other single technique has climbed from the ranks of non-use into the stratosphere of winning tournaments nationwide so quickly. And while typical vertical jigging methods often require “spoon bending concentration.” Jigging Raps and their cousin the Shiver Minnow are remarkably simple to fish.
Here we are 5 years later and some people still don’t embrace the glide bait game. Completely baffles me how someone can claim to be interested in walleye fishing, yet not at least dabble in the glide bait thing. EVERY 100 pound-plus tournament catch in the state last year was at least, in part, a glide bait catch. Don’t try to tell me you aren’t interested in averaging ten pounds per walleye? But if you don’t play the glide bait game, you are proving that walleye fishing just isn’t that important to you. (I’m retirement age with MS for 30 years and a host of physical problems to go with it... I DON’T LIKE the glide bait game. It’s hard work and even painful, but I play it with gusto because I live for trophy walleyes! And miserable as my body gets, glide baiting is a complete blast!). If you aren’t already playing…time to sign up! Frankly, Monroe and Ingram do a very informative fishing seminar loaded with glide bait tips. It’s worth driving cross-state to catch one of their presentations
Monroe Organizes Shiver Minnows Into One of the Five Glide Bait Boxes He and Ingram Use on the Montana Walleye Circuit. It's That Important!
It’s no secret that Monroe owns a Ranger Boats dealership—High Country Boats—in Helena. So of course, they work from a deluxe and capable Ranger tournament model multi-species Deep-V boat. And Ingram runs a Ranger as his personal boat. If you follow the national walleye circuits, you’ve noticed the disproportionally high percentage of Rangers at the top levels of tournament fishing. In most national tourneys you’ll see more Rangers represented than all other brands combined. There are reasons for that: controllability, tracking like a slot car, rough water dominance, electronics placement, gear storage, comfort, tournament bonus money, etc. And as a Ranger dealer, Monroe works with all the Ranger Pro’s across the state. Though nobody gives up their secrets, a bit of networking is a solid way to make sure you are on track. Hanging with other tournament pro’s for “bench talk” sessions does nothing but good for any anglers’ competence.
Another thing Monroe and Ingram do religiously is specialize their gear for each technique. They both use the St. Croix glide bait rods--the high end version as well as the relatively affordable Eyecon and Avid X versions. If you aren’t familiar, this is a spinning rod designed with an extended foregrip to allow active jigging of heavy baits while gripping in front of the reel-seat for balance and leverage. Both do their traditional jigging with high-end or even custom-made rods. Their spinning reels are top-flight…no silent letter cheapies, wild paint jobs or other gimmicks. And though these guys really dislike trolling presentations, if the situation calls for it, they have trolling rods with line counters and lead-core etc. If they are going to fish a particular presentation, Jake and Jeff are committed to doing it at the highest possible technical level. They just don’t “fake it” with whatever gear they have on hand.
Extended Foregrips on the St. Croix Jig-N-Rap and Rip-n-Rap Rods Compensate for Heavy Glide Baits. Balance and Leverage Are Enhanced With the Forward Grip Position. This Also Compensates for Lighter Reels and Longer Rod Lengths So Common for Modern Techniques
And here’s a tidbit most people don’t realize: because Ingram and Monroe are so well-known for their jigging skills (with plastics typically rather than bait) and for their glide bait acumen, there is an assumption that they don’t do dead rods. Wrong! These guys play the odds, and that means upping their odds with as many lines in the water as the regs allow. A couple years ago they went on a dead rod runner catching walleyes over 30 inches on dead rod leech “sneaker” presentations at several tourneys. Jake varies from Western norms and uses a Lindy slip sinker for his dead rod bait game…and commonly fishes it just above bottom rather than dragging.
Plastic bodies on jigs are where the guys trust in one another really shows. Jeff’s paddletail of choice is a Keitech while Jake’s is the Berkley Ripple Shad. And each has a few choice colors they prefer. They trust each other to run with their own confidence baits. And of course, both are not set in their ways and willing to dump their “standard” brand to fish whatever the walleyes prefer.
There it is. The state’s top walleye team for 2023. They aren’t gimmicky. They don’t fish tricky. They aren’t trying to reinvent the wheel. They fish industry-standard techniques with the best gear. But above all else, they trust each other to make the right decisions in the boat. That’s what pays!
