Thread: Crappie Pose

We all know the "Crappie Pose". Holding up four fish (two in each hand) for the camera.

Left the house at 5am yesterday and made the 2hr drive over to Sunset bay resort on the south east side of Saginaw bay. I fish out of that area simply because I don't have to deal with all the people associated with the other "well known" launches. Plus, not many people fish this area.

Launched the boat around 8:20 AM and Brian and I made the 4 mile run out to an area I regularly fish. Not a boat within 3 miles! I saw something shinny floating in the water. It turned out to be a helium foil heart balloon. Must be a good omen so we set down and started fishing.

Because this was my first trolling trip of the year, I wanted to get a feel for what baits the fish would be interested in. Our six rod spread included baits of several sizes. This would allow us to dial in on what the fish were looking for. I noticed all of my marks on my Lowrance were very high in the water column. This told me of suspended fish. Reports indicated that guys were simply fishing too deep. We ran one side of the boat on an even split (40, 50, and 60 back) and the other side on the odd five split (45, 55, 65 feet back). This allowed us to cover the water column from 9 to 12 feet. We were fishing over 17 to 18 feet of water.

Took a double header on a Rapala DHJ size 10 pink glass and a DHJ size 12 with pink on it. Switched some baits. Took another fish on a Berkley size 9 flicker minnow in Pink Lemonade. As the morning wore on, the wind was non existent but the water was turning stained. We had a lull in the action and dropped all of our baits out of the strike zone. It took a little while to dial back up the right depth and make a few bait changes. Eventually, the traditional rapala black with Prism gold belly was the ticket. We landed 9 fish in short order on this color combination in both size 10 DHJ's and size 9 flicker minnows. The fish wanted smaller baits.

Radio chatter indicated that too many people were playing "Monkey see, Monkey Do". Baits were too big for the fish and they were all fishing way too deep. Gotta know how to read the electronics and know what you are looking at. We ended the trip with our limit of 16 fish (Saginaw bay limit is 8 per person). Six of the fish were spawned out females with their sizes ranging from 23 to 26 inches. The remaining 9 were milked out males in varying sizes.

I even got a plug in for Nick and Bruce over at "Offshore Tackle"!

Nice fish Rich! As always, a great report. Congrats to you and skipper Brian.

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