Ranger/Evinrude Pro Steve Miller and Brian Yeo won the Walleye Anglers Trail event at Genoa, WI on Sunday, July 24, 2018 with five fish weighing 16.35 pounds and claimed the first place purse of $1975! I caught up with Steve this past week and talked to him about the Mississippi River tournament and their first win since fishing together as a team for three years. “The WAT field is so competitive and you are forced to get better if you want to compete with these sticks,” Steve commented. “They are really an “elite” group of river guys!” he added. To notch their win, they fished a slough near Lansing. My partner for the event, JD Knight, and I were fishing in an area using live bait rigs close to where Steve and Brian were fishing. “We caught our fish using a combination of trolling and casting. We used the side imaging feature on Brian’s Hummingbird unit to stay in the clean water away from the weeds. We were using spinning rod with #200 Bandits for both the trolling and casting,” Steve explained. With less than seven minutes to check in, they caught an upgrade walleye , an 18 3/4 incher, by casting an area not far from the boat ramp! “That fish was huge for our win,” Steve added. JD and I weighed a limit of five for 7.69 pounds for 16th place out of the 29 boats competing in the event. The WAT Championship will be October 14, 2018 at Dubuque, IA. I asked Steve how he plans to fish for the Championship: “We’ll have willow cats–the wiser, bigger fish like to eat them! Plus, we’ll need to develop four our five trolling runs to match the live bait bite,” he concluded. Please use the link here at walleyewisdom.com to WAT to see all the season results and check out future reports. Thanks to Steve for taking the time to visit and kudos on the win! Spike