Tough day on the lake---weather man strikes out again

[M R Dux]

With the holiday weekend coming up and the prospects of wall-to-wall lake lice, I decided to get away for a few hours Wednesday morning with my Dad and Thursday afternoon with Quackrstackr. I'll be in the studio while the yahoos take over the lake all weekend.

Dad and I fished 3 hours or so and ended up with 6 small keepers and a bunch of catfish.

Tim and I had been wanting to get back to Blood River to try out my recent purchase of a LakeMaster v2 map card for my HB. The Navionics I had used in the past was not very accurate in the Blood River area. Map discrepancies while pulling cranks can make for an expensive trip.The weather forecast was for 7 mph winds from the northwest, not bad for Blood. When we got to the main lake ramp just south of Blood, we were greeted by 3 foot rollers.Our planned trolling spots would have to wait so we went to plan B.

We made our first pass on a ledge that has been really good to us in the past but with the wind like it was, we had to go with the wind and didn't catch anything. I ended up having to just prospect around and find ledges that we could manage with the wind speed and direction.After a couple of hours and a couple of keepers, it seemed the wind had laid down some so I headed out onto the main lake. I had 2 ledges to try that ran for a mile or so, coming off the river channel. As we came out of Blood, we were hit again with the 3 foot rollers. We decided to stick it out, go with the wind and do the best we could do to check out a spot we had not fished with cranks before. It ended up being an expensive venture. The ledge was a table-top drop that would go from 6 feet deep on top to 25 feet deep in less than a boat length. It also ran at an angle to the wind direction so I was constantly fighting a slight cross wind in the rollers that were trying to break over the transom. My boat handling skill were seriously tested and I failed miserably.

We caught a couple of small keepers pretty soon after starting down one ledge and thought it was going to be on in spite of the conditions. Other than a 3 pound LMB that I let flip off at the boat, that was it for fish in the boat. Being new spots, I didn't have any structure waypoints to avoid so we were losing baits pretty regularly.(It seems funny to a crappie fisherman to spend time waypointing structure to AVOID but you have to with trolling cranks) When you are being pushed by 15+ winds in 3 foot seas, you are not going to turn around and go back to try to get a bait loose. Break it off and go on.

After a couple of hours and finally hitting something on the side of a ledge that cost us 5 crankbaits at one time, we decided to call it a day and lick our wounds. We had 5 small keepers and more than a dozen fewer baits than we had started with. I did find out the the LakeMaster map card is far superior in that area to the Navionics card.

Oh Well. I should have 30 new Chinese crankbait blanks in the mailbox on Sat so I can paint up/replace many of the color combos that now reside on the bottom. Lots of folks look at my crankbait set-up in my boat and say there's no way they want to go to all that trouble and expense to catch crappie.If any of them were riding the fence about starting cranks, Thursday would have probably took that thought away from them as quick as I can snap 10 pound mono on a brushpile.

I do want to shout out to Floatntiny and his buddy Hugh. We had been trying to get together for a while to meet and exchange some info and BS. I got to meet them Wednesday morning and they are both the kinds of guys who can humble a local like me when they come down to Ky Lake and drop those cranks over the side. Good guys who I hope to get to share the boat with soon.

[chaunc]

5 cranks at one time. And only 2 of you in the boat..... Thank goodness for good drags, huh. I'd have been done for the day too. I hope those weren't all the baits you've been painting. I'd have tears running down my face after all that work. Hope you get another chance to fish that area when the winds aren't so bad..... and i hope you marked that snag with a waypoint. Probably looks like an xmas tree now, complete with all the decorations. Hope to see you this fall.

[M R Dux]

Most of the baits were my custom jobs. Tim got tired of losing his baits so he started pulling mine!LOL!! That's why I buy them and paint them.

[badbrad]

Painful to lose cranks....but one 16" in the boat can erase a lot. There's definitely a steep learning curve to the "where" equation of pulling them. Just more experience under your belt now Doug.

[Yodibuzz]

Great report Doug. Thanks for posting.

[endo2075]

That wind got me too.

[endo2075]

It must be nice to be a weatherman and be able to get it wrong.

[Quackrstackr]

Hey, I asked you as soon as we got in the water what baits you didn't want to lose and took all of those off. I thought I was doing pretty well on a crankbait collection but my tackle box is noticeably lighter today than it was when we left yesterday. Time to order a dozen new ones, I suppose.

Let's do it again soon.
(just not when there's 3 foot rollers out there)