02-02-2024, 06:24 PM
(02-02-2024, 05:35 PM)wiperhunter2 Wrote: No doubt better days are ahead, fishing wise, hopefully sooner than later. With the high water we got last year and it appears it will happen again this year, my hope is that those high crappie numbers we have seen in the past will return and we will be seeing larger numbers of decent crappie before too long. Until then, it's a matter of doing a lot of searching for the few crappie you can catch, hoping we will hit that one spot where we can put a limit in the livewell or fish basket in a single outing.The problem is that it is not an automatic good year whenever there is high water. Good years are about 3-5 years from the years with high water...when the crappies can get off a good spawn. Haven't had any good years for several years now and the crappie numbers stay low. And it doesn't help that the happy harvesters rape the few crappies that come inside the marinas each year. Some of them return several times a day to fill buckets and then take them home...to return again and again. Gets to be full contact combat fishing when the crappies are in. A lot of potential spawners are bucketed before ever having a chance to help build the numbers.
In the olden days...BS (before shad)...Willard was full of crappies year round. And you could catch them year round...all around the lake...right off the rocks. Water levels seldom got too far below the full mark and there were no wipers to feed on baby crappies...or shad to eat all the zooplankton that baby crappies need to survive and grow. A double whammy...made worse when the crappies have no place to spawn and carp eat all the eggs that are just dumped anywhere in the lake.