Walleye Fishing Hats

Walleye fishing has its own calendar. By Minnesota statute the opener falls two weekends before Memorial Day weekend, which puts it on Mother's Day weekend most years. When the state House voted in 2012 to move an opener off Mother's Day, partly in the hope of preserving family unity, the Christian Science Monitor ran it as "Mother's Day in Minnesota: bass fishing vs. brunch." The state also runs Take a Mom Fishing Weekend, which began in 1988 and lets moms fish license-free. The 2026 opener was Saturday, May 9, with the 78th Governor's Opener held in Stillwater on the St. Croix River. Walleye is Minnesota's state fish, and as one angler put it on opening weekend, "walleye is always what everybody wants." Ontario and Upper Michigan hold walleye openers of their own, and the vocabulary travels with them: walleye chop, night bite, leeches, minnows and crawlers, and shore lunch, a guided-trip tradition at places like Lake of the Woods. These walleye fishing hats start with WALLEYE FISHING and WALLEYE OPENER as the plain badges, then carry the terms anglers type into search boxes: WALLEYE CHOP, SHORE LUNCH, WALLEYE COUNTRY and the live bait list. GOLDEN HOUR IS WALLEYE HOUR and I ONLY HAVE EYES FOR WALLEYE round out the set, since eyes is the Midwest nickname for the fish. WALLEYE CHOP and WALLEYE COUNTRY each get a second colorway. Every design is custom embroidered on an unstructured dad hat, for the family that plans its weekends around the opener.