July 5 Crappie on Jordan

[JordanLimit]

The summer-time pattern is in full swing on Jordan. Spent most of the morning doing traditional long-lining and had fair success. I needed a dozen for a family fish fry on Friday night and were able to get them. It was frustrating because I could see we were on good fish, but not getting them to bite. Taking a page out of Kevin's book, I told Charles we need to switch our presentation.

We did and it was game on the next hour. Charles got this 14" crappie and we had a couple of 13" fish that probably weighed more than the 14. They had those traditional thick shoulders and the 14" was more of a long crappie. Not going to say a whole lot about what change we made, but will say we used all artificial baits the whole day--no minnows on the boat. We kept about 20 crappie and threw back quite a few, plus lots of perch. Charles' neighbor Greg went with us and he had some nice catches as well.

In the first screenshot, you will see a typical Jordan summer setup. Schools of shad everywhere we went in this area and fish under them. As you can see, the 10' depth is were the fish were staged and the depth we concentrated on. The second screenshot is what I think are white perch. We definitely caught our fair share.

The third screenshot is kind of interesting. In tournament fishing a lot of different lakes in the Carolina's, we know brush-pile fishing is quite successful. Three years ago Charles and I put out about a dozen brush piles on Jordan. You will see one of them on the last screenshot. It is on the right, just below middle of the picture. You can probably see the shadow better than the tree. One thing you don't see are any fish. We have yet to find any crappie on any of the brush. They may work on other lakes, but not on Jordan for us. The fish we consistently catch are out in the open chasing shad. About a month ago, we caught over 100 crappie on a Saturday at Jordan, none anywhere near any brush. We spent just about a whole day cutting down trees and attaching them to cinder blocks. Not going to do that again when we can catch very nice fish out chasing shad. By the way, we rarely ever keep any crappie during the tournament season. Like to put those big fish back in the lake. We take these hot summer days to fill our freezers for the coming year with those 11" and 12" fish.