Ross Barnett

Today’s fishing trip was father/daughter time; my son didn’t get enough sleep and just wanted to stay home. Yesterday’s rain seemed to keep the water’s surface temp around 74-75 degrees F during the day, and it was still cloudy much of the morning. The extra water and cloud cover seemed to contribute to the slow bite, and I wasn’t getting many bites in the 10-16’ range on crankbaits. The deep contours didn’t seem to get much other than catfish. After the first pass, we had a couple of decent catfish and a couple of 10” crappie. After I motored back to my start point, we really didn’t get much activity and was thinking that we might end up heading home with little to show, so I decided to try a little shallower. Once the sun finally got out of the clouds, the bite turned on, and we started getting most of our crappie, nicer catfish (including my daughter’s 1#10oz), and a decent bass in the last 1.5 hours before we went home. I don’t remember the catfish total for us, although we ended up with 11 crappie, with most of them still in 8-10’ and a couple between 12-14’.

My dad was fishing another part of the Rez pulling crankbaits as well and ended up with 3 small crappie and the majority of the catfish. We transferred them to my livewell for me to clean. Most people where he was at left by lunch, mostly hovering over a couple of key brush piles but not producing much—I think it was still too early and needed the sun to wake them up.

This is the cooler with all fish.


This is the cooler with the catfish removed and just the crappie and the bass still in there. Most of them still had eggs, and most were in the 10” range. One of my dad’s was a little smaller than 10”, and one of mine was a little over 1#.


Oddly enough, I had several wakeboard boats riding too close to me in the early morning creating big wake issues, although I didn’t have as much (or they quit riding so close to me) around lunch time. One of them was stopped outside of Shaggy’s running both bilge pumps when we started fishing this morning, and I’m not sure if someone forgot to put in the plug or if they thought it would be a good idea to add water to the bilge to create more wake but couldn’t get on plane right to pull the wakeboarder behind properly.


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