Kankakee River Backwaters - Horseshoe Bend

[fish_a_holic]

Went out to Horseshoe Bend with my friend crappiehunter (Mike) this morning after 4 days of constant rain...surprisingly, not a bad day to be out.

This is where we started and where Mike caught his first bass


...and here it is! His first buzz bait bass - WTG Mike.


Mike continued to catch some small bass on a chartreuse/white tiki worm T-rigged weightless, and I had a few decent hits but only managed one bass today, while Mike got 5 - all the bass today were small (under 16").

We had to get creative to get where we really wanted to fish...


The reward for being persistent and continuing to work the shoreline and trees was this little bass


It was obvious that the bigger fish weren't going to cooperate today, so I changed tactics and started fishing with a 1/32 oz. green/chartreuse tube bait with a Berkley nymph slid onto the hook and up inside the tube partially creating a green/chartreuse/orange/brown combination bait.

Here's the reward for changing tactics


I ended up catching 16 crappies and 3 bonus gills over 10"

Mike gets in on the crappie action too


Nature Notes: we saw several great blue herons, a night heron, more than a dozen kingfishers, red-headed woodpeckers, yellow-shafted flickers, goldfinches, and mud turtles here's my Nature Notes photo, a Question Mark Butterfly (that's the actual name of it).


...all in all, another great time had by me down by the Kankakee!
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