HOLY CRAPpie!

Mike and I have been fishing a nice crappie lake along the shoreline recently. The bite is great early but dies off after 8 every morning. This time, we decided to get down there earlier to see if we could have a longer bite, we met at CT Outfitters a little before 4am and headed south. We found the fish in the same general area, suspended at 20-24 feet over 30 feet of water. We walked from hole to hole with the Humminbird flashers until we   fish.. It didn’t take long at all to start catching.  Sometimes there would be a solitary fish but most times, there were several. The competition for food made them pretty aggressive at times. In this first picture, you can clearly see two more fish showing on the screen… There were lots of quality fish. Many were over 14″. Mike and I were joking that a fish like that on the coves would be picture worthy but on this pond, it wasn’t worth pulling the camera out.

Sometime around dawn, Mike stuck a huge fish. The rod was doubled over and line was coming off the reel. I never thought it was a crappie the entire time he was fighting it and was stunned we it came to the hole. It was a gorgeous 18″ crappie that was incredibly well fed!  A couple of quick pics and se went back down the hole. Mike has promised to try to smile for the pics inte future…

We kept plugging away with decent sized fish, but as usual, things slowed again after 8. Today we had a little more time and decided to move around to see if we could figure out where they went.  I drilled a line of holes spaced every 25 feet or so. I would drill 10 holes and check with flasher. We found a fish every once in a while but kept moving. About a 1/4 mile later, we started coming up a ledge. The water went from 31 feet to 23 quickly, suddenly we began marking fish at nearly every drop of the transducer. In the next hour, we caught at least 15 fish with several over 15″.  We ran out of time and had to pack up around 10:30. As we walked back to where we had started, we noticed that Mike had a flag up. There was no telling how long it had been up…  When Mike picked it up, every last inch of line had been run off and all that was left was the knot on the spool. Mike set the hook and fought the fish. 75 yards of line later, Mike had a nice 4 pound bass to the hole… Note the empty spool in the picture…