Thread: Evening trip to Sessions Lake.

As Jeff said in his thread, we made plans to hit the evening/after dark bite on Morrison Lake to see if the bigger crappie would turn on later in the day. I gave him enough time to eat a quick bite when him and Michelle got home from their trip, then picked him up about 4:30 and we headed to the lake. On the way he filled me in on their trip and we laid down a strategy for ours.

We were both optimistic about our chances, less than two hours earlier he was on this same lake and knew where the fish were and what they wanted. Visions of huge numbers of crappie being caught were dancing in both our heads, nothing could stop us. As we neared the lake Jeff commented on how there were more vehicles in the parking lot than earlier, maybe a bass tourney or something. Something ended up being a parking lot filled to capacity with at least 5 spaces taken up by trailerless vehicles.

Now it was decision time. We could 1) park along the road and get a 75.00 ticket, 2) say screw it and head back home or 3) find another lake to fish. We chose option 3 and decided to head over to Sessions Lake, a small, no wake lake in Sessions Lake State Park. Small, no wake, surrounded by state land, sounded like just the kind of place where two buddies could spend a relaxing evening enjoying nature, heck, we really didn't think we would catch many fish and didn't really care.

We started out long line trolling along steep drop offs, pulling sliders on 1/16 oz jig heads, watermelon/chartreuse and white/chartreuse. Nothing. Next it was a 12'-15' flat with scattered weeds that looked promising but another big fat zero. We made a wide turn to make another pass over the 15' flat and ended up on a 9'-11' very weedy flat with the weeds coming within 4' of the surface. Too shallow, too weedy, too warm. That's what we thought but apparently no one told the fish. I hooked up first as we were dropping into deeper water, a small 7 1/2" crappie. Another pass over the weed bed put three more in the boat, all the same as the first. We dialed it in so we were trolling a 200 yard area back and forth and were catching crappie and bass on every pass.

After we wore that area out we moved across the lake to a similar type of area and made several passes, catching lots of small crappie and bass and one real nice bluegill. We landed at least 40 fish and all were returned to the water. I even got to catch some crappie with my new to me vintage Wondereel. That was pretty cool.

What started out as a trip to forget ended up being a trip to remember.