Fishing Forum

I had the great honor to fish with Owen Schroder this morning. Owen is in town to attend the Outdoor Writers Convention and Richard Simms arranged for me to take Owen out for some crappie fishing. Owen is from Clarksville, Tn.<br /><br />Owen likes to fish for shellcrackers too, so the first stop that we made was to one of my old standby shellcracker beds, but the water lacks about 18" to be right for the crackers to be in there. Owen caught a couple of bluegills, but no crackers in that spot. <br /><br />I then took Owen to training dock #1 for a dock shooting lesson. He had heard of, but never experienced this technique for crappie fishing. We caught several smaller fish, enough for Owen to get the hang of it and then we set out for off shore structure where I hoped there would be bigger crappie. I'm guessing that we caught about 10 fish at the training dock and about 20 or more on the off shore structure. We caught about 5 little fish for every keeper sized fish that we caught. Sort of follows the pattern that most folks have experienced this year. The biggest fish by Owen was 13.25 inches long. I was hoping for a TARP fish, but today, they didn't show up.<br /><br />Then we went back to dock shooting. Owen wanted to take some more pics around docks and such, so we hit a couple more docks. The first dock, it was a fish on just about every cast, but not many keepers there. We hit one more dock and caught 5 or 6 more before we decided to head back to the HBSP and have lunch and call it a day. We both had a great time. My clicker is broken, so I don't have an accurate count on the fish, but I'm guessing that 40 to 50 fish was landed, including 2 rock bass and those 2 bluegills. <br /><br />Owen took most of the pics with his camera, but I did manage 1 pic of him and a crappie that was caught off the first dock. I shared info with him about CFF and fishing in general. We covered just about every thing from lures to colors, to favorite techniques, etc. He was really impressed with the "shooting" technique and how easy it is to get the hang of it. He is already conjuring up in his mind how he can apply this technique to his bass fishing. I told him that if he mastered this technique, that it would improve his bass fishing big time. <br /><br />We used Bobby Garland 2" shad lures in various colors. Screamer, Ghastly minnow, Green Hornet and Crystal shad with a tail light. The CS was the hottest color today, but we did catch fish on the others too. I am looking forward to fishing with Owen again in the future. emoBig emoGeezer