Taylorsville Crappie report 4/13

[H20man]

My wife and I got out about 730 A.M. at Settlers Trace . The lot was only 1/3 full. We went to our favorite spots and did our usual thing.
We have been fishing there for three years now and i am proud my wife has become a good fisherman. She can do it all and Ive spent a
lot of time teaching her what i know about fishing. When you get a boat seems everyone in the neighborhood becomes your friend . i
dont want to fish with the whole world so I turned my wife into my fishing buddy and she can fish like a man.
She can run her own show on the other end of the boat. She can restring a reel ,knows the difference between a
closed face and spinning reel ,a strike and a snag , can undo any kind of line tangles and birds nests, and can fish all day long in any weather. We got our boat three years ago
and jumped into crappie fishing. I had fished for everything as a kid and grew up fishing. Retirement and a boat was a perfect fit. So it is with that in mind I will tell you a funny story.

We got there early and were doing the launch. My wife hits the key and nothing. Hmmmm kind of weird i said. Rechecked everything turn key...nothing. I said well its got to be the battery we
bought last year. i lifted back hatch looked fine. I had just charged all three batteries the day before. The one for the motor and the two for everything else.Pull the boat out of the water and head
up to get a new battery. The nice guy checks the charge it and says its good. By then I am baffled and he says you always hook you battery up backwards and i looked . Yep sure enough the red was
on the negative terminal ....laughed so hard i almost cried. ive been around cars and motorcycles my whole life, red is positive black is neutral...still laughing about it.

So after half hour delay and we were in the water. At our favorite spot in short order and hit it. In a matter of 45 minutes bring in four or five little 9 inchers and throw em back. Looking for some bigger
fish. The males were all colored up for spawn. Didn't turn on fish finder. Used trolling motor to work around the point and work it about half mile down. Nothing to speak of except a few tugs and hits.
We worked that area with our favorite jigs ( Slabalicious ) for a few hours then moved on.

At the head of river where the bait fish were piled up my wife hooked into a big one in about 8 feet of water and it got loose. Plenty of fish by that time on the finder which we turned on
but they werent interested and the Crappie finesse tactics proved useless. Its then you look up and think wow its just wonderful to be on the water. We then moved to another part of the 17 mil lake
and tied up in a nice cove with trees. We worked that area with little output for about 45 minutes. What i do during the spawn is use my jigs for probing and a cast to the other side of the boat
yielded a 9 inch colored up male. We proceeded to get into a little mini spawn action and pulled up five 9 inchers and a 10 inch female which went into the live well. Then that went dead as a door nail.
We unhooked and worked the point with trolling motor for about 1/4 mile thinking maybe we were at the edge of a spawn area, yet it yielded only one of those small hard hitting Bluegill.

So our thoughts are these. Thats why its called fishing and not catching. Yes there is a lot of pressure but the lake can handle all those boats. I think maybe it has some effect on the fish though.
So somewhere between the urge to spawn and people activity the fish kind of get spooked if you will. My prediction and take it for what its worth ,from a guy who looks right at a red cable on a negative post, is that
the best fishing is yet to come in late April and early May. I think the word gets out that its a hot lake and the spawn is on like donkey kong so everyone and his brother with a john boat hits the lake.
Then it seems people who dont have the heart to just go out day after day and come back empty handed think the spawn is over when it hasnt.
Taylorsville from what Ive seen in my meager three years of fishing there a lot is it
can either blow your mind or it can frustrate the heck out of you. Last year around this time we hit a spawn and it was pretty unbelievable. I would catch the males by the shore and if that retrieve didnt work
I would catch the waiting females out in deeper water. I am not kidding when I say I filled the rest of my limit ( 8) and the other half of my wifes ( 7 ) in about 45 minutes to an hour. It was literally a fish on every single cast.
In fact the poor little Slabalicious was getting all tore up and i would just keep sliding it back on the jighead and catching fish. Yeah were pretty hooked on slabalicious no pun intended. So our first day out
yielded 10 9 inchers and we ended up throwing them all back and guess what..we still love that lake and fishing. We are not catch and release but I just didnt feel like cleaning the last five. My wife and I got a good laugh out of
those fish going back and telling the village....yeah we all had an alien abduction experience. Ya know i guess seeing a bigfoot would have about topped it off... ha ha ha !!!!!!!