Quote Originally Posted by CrappieKing2400 View Post
I'd like to be able to find a good map so I can eliminate where not to fish on these lakes. I've been fishing Rough River all my life with limited success, mainly because I wasn't very serious about it and just fished from our dock. I know some decent holes in close proximity to our place there but I would like to go to other parts of the lake and catch my limit of keepers. I don't really have the money to go buy a chartplotting gps/fish finder so I was hoping to do it the old fashioned way with a paper map.
I'll leave Rough River to you, and those that fish it a lot ... I've only fished it a few times, and mostly used minnows around standing trees in about 15ft of water or less (Spring/April).

Taylorsville is relatively small in comparison, so it's not like you have to have a real detailed map to figure out where to fish. ANY blowdown tree, in water over 10ft deep, is always a good place to try. Standing timber is in every creek & cove, hardwoods & cedar ... stay in the 8-15ft water depth range there, too (Spring/Fall - late April to early May ... Oct/Nov). You can "see" most places, without the use of a map ... but, if you're looking for dropoffs, channels, flats, creek bends, state attractor sites, etc. then a HotSpots map will work just fine.

I don't have a depth finder with GPS/color screen, or any of the other bells & whistles ... but, my el cheapo Eagle will show me depth & submerged cover, and that's all I want it to do.

I have no "guarantees" of limits, attached to any of the above info :D

I catch most of my Taylorsville Crappie using 1/16oz tube jigs or Roadrunners ... weedless jigheads/tubes for fishing timber & submerged wood cover -- Roadrunners for fishing open water spots. Used to use minnows alot, and tightline around standing timber (mostly late Spring into early Summer) and even used a float on occasion. Fished minnows in the 12-18ft depth range. Then I found out that T-ville Crappie liked tube jigs ... and haven't really bothered taking minnows since. Most any color pattern works there, as long as it has some Chartreuse in it. Electric Blue/Char & green/char have been very good producers for me, at T-ville.
T-ville floods easily, so I'd check on the water levels before making any trip to it. You can find them here : http://www.lrl.usace.army.mil/wc/reports/lkreport.html ... then click on the "Todays Pool Feet" number for the lake, and it will give you a graph of the past years water level progression ( http://www.lrl.usace.army.mil/wc/res...plots/tvl.html ) and you can see if the water is stable, falling, or rising. Rough River Lake is included in there, too.
Oh, and just in case you don't know ... Taylorsville size limit is 9" & daily creel limit is 15fish/person.

... luck2ya ... cp