Sunrise Crappie

Went south this morning to my favorite crappie lake.  There is still a ton of snow on the ground and it is exhausting pulling a sled through 18″ of snow, especially when tere is a steep hill involved.. I met Mike and Josh at Connecticut Outfitters at 5:30 and we stripped our gear down to the bare minimum and packed into a single sled.

We had 15 degrees and no wind to start. There was the expected amount of snow on the ground but the ice had only a couple of inches on it, the rest o the snow hd soaked throuh and froze solid. We were now fishing on 12″ of ice compared to 7 last week. We had our holes drilled by 6:30 and just like last time, we were marking fish right away. We started in 31 feet of water and had most of our fish suspended a th 20-24 foot range.  Mike scored first with a massive fish. She hit a Lindy Rattl’n Flyer tipped with a shiner…

Things slowed a bit after Mikes fish. We were marking quite a few and they would come right up to the lures but they just wouldn’t eat. We tried all the usual tricks and caught only a few smaller ones over the next half an hour. We had an awesome sunrise this morning. It started off as a faint glow that steadily got brighter and brighter…

We tag teamed the auger and drilled a bunch more holes to extend our fishing area, must have done 100 holes on the morning. We were finally rewarded for our efforts when we started marking fish at the same depths, just farther out into the lake. I had a hole where I banged 6 fish in a row. One of them was a decent fish, the rest were in the 10 to 12″ range.

We hopped around quite a bit after that. Things really slowed after 9, and eventually we stopped marking anything at all. Not sure how many we caught all together but it was a great 3 hours. I made it to work early and Mike headed out on his own to Coventry for the afternoon bite