12-06-2010, 10:00 AM
CCSM had wanted to take a buddy crappie fishing and today was the day. It was too cold this morning for my usual tag along, Freida, but she was mad that I didn't take her when I got back home. I hadn't been on the lake for a while and so I did fish a few places with a buddy yesterday afternoon but we never found a good bunch of fish, just one or two here and there. The creek was muddy and the areas that had been good to me recently were too muddy to fish so we had to explore a bit. The fishing was really slow in the morning and it was very cold. The wind also became a factor later in the day. I was worried that we weren't going to do very well as the first two places we stopped, main lake docks, didn't produce much at all. We ended up going to a bluff and finding some fish at about a 12 count with 1/32 oz PAs. We tried another bluff close by and caught a few right off but the water on the main lake was pretty muddy, the flow was strong and we used 1/16 ozers there. I know that there were a bunch of fish there, or at least there should have been, but whenever the water is muddy it's hard to get them. We then went to a deep spot on a roadbed and only caught one small keeper. From there we decided to hit a dock that we had already tried but the sun was higher and we hoped that the fish that we thought were ready to bite and they were. We caught a few there this time around. We then ran up lake to find clearer water. The dock that we were headed to had someone in one of the bays tied up and fishing. We went to a nearby dock and caught a few more nice fish there. We then ran up lake to a dock that had been holding some fish and caught a bunch off of it. We tried a bluff near by and two docks that were close and didn't catch any on those spots. We ran back down lake as it was getting later in the day and we had to be home by 4:30. We hit a couple of docks that we had already been on and caught a few more. We got home right on time at 4:30. When we finished I thought that we probably only had between 15 and 20 good keepers but to my amazement we had 30 good keepers and had thrown many back that were in the 10-11 inch range. I filleted half and let the 2nd half go. I didn't measure the first half but was amazed at how many really nice ones we had caught. I measured the six biggest looking ones that I threw back and all were over 13 inches with some 13.5. No TARPs today but there were many others in the 13 inch range that I filleted. We may have had a dozen over 13 inches, much better than I had thought. We had a great time together out there, despite the cold and I got a bunch of fillets for some friends at work. Here's a pic of a couple of nice ones.