Monticello changed but still biting...
After Saturday's nice catch (detailed in other post) I had the urge to put a few more in the bucket, so I went out Monday evening after work. I hit the water about 6:30pm (3-21-11). SCE&G had seen fit to pump the lake up by 2 feet. The introduction of this water chilled the lake a good bit and the crappy had left the 6-10 foot water where we had been tearin up Saturday. I cast around a bit, never could really lock onto em, so decided since I had taken Tuesday off, I would do some cooler fishing Monday night and return to crappy fishin Tuesday afternoon. The weather report was claiming 80+ temps, I was hoping the fish would like the warmer weather.
Tuesday was a beautiful day, 83ish temp, clear sky, light breeze, barely ruffling the water. Three of us head onto the dock at about 2pm. Knowing that the water hadn't warmed back up, we worked all around the dock looking for fish, 30 minutes in, nothing. I was afraid it was gonna be another day for cooler fishing when I decided that the cooler water had made em go deeper than we were fishin. We were using the clear green Crappie Delight jig that you find in smaller bait shops. So I cast straight out into deeper water, gave it about 5-7 seconds to sink and then brought it home nice and steady. BINGO! There they were about 10 feet off the dock in 12 to no more than 15 feet of water. Hungry little buggers too! We bucketed 46 nice sized fish including 3 in the near 2lbs range. Spent about 2.5 to 3 hours after we were on em, so a not too shabby frequency on the bite either.
Fishin Report over. For those of you not familiar with Monticello, read on if you are interested in the lake.
Construction of Monticello started in 1972, the primary purpose of the lake is to provide cooling resources for the V.C. Summer nuclear power station. The secondary function of the lake is what is called "Pumped Storage". If you own a nuclear reactor, you know that the most efficient way to operate it is to fuel it, fire it, crank it up to 100% and let it run. So, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, this nuke is cranking out its allotted wattage. However, demand on the grid fluctuates. So, sometimes you have an excess of power being produced, sure, you can sell to other power vendors, but you probably aren't making a bunch of money doing it and let's face it, money is the point of business. Enter "Pumped Storage", Monticello does have some springs and creeks, but is mostly fed by the Broad River. However if you look at a map you will see that Monti is BESIDE the river and there is no diversion or conversion dam to fill Monti. The hydro plant on Monti runs BOTH ways, thus the Pump in pumped storage. During high demand times the gates are opened and water is drained from the lake, through the hydro turbines, thus generating electricity. When demand falls off, the excess power generated by the nuke is used to spin the turbines back in the other direction and pump water out of Broad River up into Monticello. Think of your grade school physics, lifting something up uses energy, in this case electricity, once it is stationary it has potential energy, think "stored" energy, letting it fall, is releasing kinetic energy, that kinetic energy spins the turbines which spin the generators thereby converting kinetic energy back to electricity. In a nutshell, Lake Monticello is a big battery. THAT is why Monticello fluctuates SO much sometimes. It can go 3-5 feet in either direction, up or down, in a few hours. That's probably more than anyone REALLY wanted to know about Monticello.
Be well,
Birdson
