4/28 crappies

The lake was a bit different Weds than it was last Friday. Cooler air had the water temps moved backwards from the low 60's to the mid-50's. By noon Weds the water had only recovered about a degree. That comes with three nights back to back of temps down in the twenties.

The sunfish were easy. Get your line in the water and keep it wet for 20 seconds and you'd have one. Crappies took some snooping and they took some willingness to change baits....colors, profiles, retrieves, sizes....but they did get found. We noticed lots of fish suspended and scattered over deeper, structureless water near some shallower water with some vertical structure. They were directly relating to structure but not far away. Many of our better fish came by casting to what looked like the dead sea....nothing there specifically. Except a fish or two.

"Scattered" was the word. We'd get no more than two fish at any given location as long as we had more than 9 feet of water. Any less water and all we'd see were sunfish. If we stayed on a spot after two fish it was slow. If we'd move to a different spot, then return to one that gave up fish we'd get another couple. That was the case all over the lake. Needless to say we used some fuel.

I kept 6 fish for dinner and they were darned tasty. Mark kept a dozen between crappies and sunfish for their dinner. We actually did catch a ton of fish, but we really had to do some digging to stay with better crappies.