Saturday-Suffolk-82 crappie but no big ones.

I broke out my jon boat and headed out to Suffolk. The bite was slow first thing with most caught 10' down with a black/pink BGBS then I went with Blue Ice for most of the rest of the day. I caught a bunch vertical jigging a black/chartreuse wasshoppah tipped with a chartreuse crappie nibble but it seemed that the deeper I went the smaller the crappie were. Nothing at 1lb, quite a few small ones with most in the 9" to 10" range and not many between 11"-12".

Of the 1,037 crappie I have caught (8 different bodies of water) since July 4, only 8 of them have been at 1lb or better. Hopefully with the colder weather moving in that will improve. The last 4 months have been tough for me as far as bigger crappie go.

Interesting thing happened today. I was vertical jigging deep water and catching roughly 8" crappie 20' deep. Twice while the crappie was within a few feet of the surface a bass came up and tried to eat it. The bass wasn't that big and I think it was the same one both times, but then a short time later, once again bringing up a smaller crappie from 20' down, a much larger bass came up and grabbed the crappie. I went from very little resistance on my line to whoa. Fortunately for the crappie the bass let go when it was a couple feet from the surface. Even with as big as the bass was, I don't see how it could have swallowed the crappie. I probably saved the bass and the crappie.

Where's the beef. The bigger crappie seem to be eluding you. At least you had some good action, the big fish are coming.

Tap I had the same problem this year fishing brush but I started to up size my baits to 3 in tubes or bigger flys when i first got to the pile and that seemed to help with the overall size a bit.