Post Frontal Hurricane Trip

A cat-1 hurricane came close to us here in New England on Friday. Poured cats n' dogs. Heavy winds & many power outages. Saturday it cleared out like crystal....blue bird skies, very heavy wind still though, with gusts over 30 mph.. So, my partner & I decided to postpone a trip to a local reservoir until today. We launched at 7:30 am and were off the water by 2 pm.

It was still pretty breezy with 2' white caps on the section we were fishing. We drifted with the allowed 2 rods per fisherman. As I've written previously, this is open water and very clear with a max. depth in this area of about 26'. We drifted over the main basin, which averages around 22'. Our speed was very FAST! Probably approaching 3 - 5 mph.

We used 1/16 & 1/8 oz. ball heads with a variety of 2" plastics. Three of the rods were filled with 2# test line, the third with 4# test - all Fireline with mono leaders. Biggest producers were #1) straight tails, #2) paddle tails and #3) curly tails. We lost count of the number of crappie and bluegill we caught & released today; well over 100 crappie alone. Probably another 2 - 3 doz. gills. Here are a few pictures of some of them:

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That's me, with a sample of the dozen or so crappie I took in the first hour of our drift. Here's a few more:

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Average of the gills we took:

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And here's a couple of my partner's catches:

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If you were to tell me that "speed drifting" for crappie was an effective presentation, I'd believe you, but I'd also think you might have been sipping the sauce a bit! However, after today, I'm not so sure that crappie don't enjoy an occasional "quick" snack. :)

Any of you experience (what I consider to be) extraordinary fishing like this, after a severe cold front? And employing such a fast presentation?

Not quite those same "post frontal" conditions .... but I did find out, many decades ago, that Crappie will bite in some rough water conditions. We were fishing Douglas Lake, down in NE Tenn, when the changing weather put us out on the main lake in whitecap conditions. Trolling motor was only strong enough to keep the boat turned sideways in the wind/waves. We actually were letting the wind blow us back towards a creek, with the idea that we could get out of the wind/waves once we got around the point at the mouth of the creek. Rather than reel all our lines in, we elected to just let them drag behind us, off the side of the boat. Our minnow rigs (hook/sinker/minnow) couldn't have been more than a few feet under the surface of the waves, as we were likely being blown along at 2-3mph & our lines were stretched out almost at a 90deg angle :Rofl Still, we managed to hook & boat several nice Crappie before reaching calmer waters. We returned back to the heavy chop of the main lake, several times, and allowed the wind/waves to push us across the lake ... and boated several more Crappie in the process.

That's the only time I can remember something like that happening, under those conditions. "Speed Drifting" is a good name for it :biggrin

... cp :kewl

Nice fish

Glad they went on the post storm bite.

Nice.