Deep Thoughts, by JaoeyP

[jaoeyp]

As is my tradition, I spent yesterday on Mark Twain Lake fishing for crappie. We had to wait for some rain to quit when we got to the boat ramp, but after 25 minutes, it had slowed down enough that Jeremiah (my best friend) and I were ready to get out there. I had just rigged dad's boat with a new set of Humminbird's (999 and 959) and a Fortrex 80. Also new on the boat were two rod holder set-ups for spider rigging. Having read a suggestion on this thread, we decided to only work two poles each until we could get the hang of it. I have very little experience working a trolling motor and picked a dandy of a day to make my first attempt at spider rigging. First, fishing multiple 12' poles, each with multiple hooks is hard! I've got the marks on my hands to prove it. Second, doing so while also messing with the trolling motor is harder! Third, 25 MPH winds makes this REALLY hard. We were able to find a few spots on the lake with a bit of cover from the wind and did some slow trolling. More than a few times we had lots of fish on the graphs. We ended up only catching 8 crappie- 1 was a keeper, the rest were very small, one of which had to have been the smallest crappie I've ever seen. Jeremiah and I made some good observations. The great thing about having a fancy graph up front is at least if you're not catching fish you can watch TV. We also found the graph was great at letting us know just how poor of crappie fishermen we were. Finally, we decided that even if we weren't any good at crappie fishing, at least we look really serious about it with all the new gear on the boat.

Happy Easter Everyone!

-JaoeyP