Crankin the Big G 13 Jul

Took my favorite fishing buddy, my wife Margo, out Sunday morning at 0645 and we hit the Big G in an area where we found the crappie last weekend. We started to troll crankbaits about 0700 along a creek channel. The first fish that hit was a nice 17" bass that put up a great fight. The bass hit before I got all the lines out. The grass was pretty bad this trip and we had to make a couple of quick maneuvers to avoid big mats floating thru the area. So we spent a fair amount of time clearing lines during the trip. The crappie we caught were really nice sized whites, all 13-16", and they inhaled the bandit 300 crank baits. Mad cow and TN shad patterns were catching as well as some wiggle warts I tried out. All the baits were trolled 95-100' back of the boat at 1.6-20 mph. The fish seemed to like the slower speed of 1.6 over 1.8-2.0 mph The wind was blowing at 3-5 mph out of the SW. We ended up with 8 good fish and two bass one of the bass was a 3 1/2 lb'er that Margo caught. Here's a pic of Margo with big fish of the day, didn't take a shot of any of the crappie. (go figure?) Water temp was 85.8. Saw some fresh water shrimp in the grass that we were pulling off the baits on a regular basis. A nice to know contributing factor to the health of these fish. Threw the crappie on ice in a cooler as soon as they came in the boat, they stayed nice and firm and were beautiful when I filleted them out that afternoon. We fished until 1045 and beat the heat and boat traffic of the day. Not exactly killing 'em but at least we are finding a few.

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Nice job Bob D. Looks like yall had fun.

Watch out in that area, there's a LOT of big drum in there.

good report thanks

Way to go Margo.

Very nice!!! Something to think about down the road or even next trip, if you are having problems with lines getting fouled by the grass you can push them, the weight will catch the grass and help keep it off the bait, we had to do this at Enid the other day because of all the trash.

Thanks for the pushing advice. How much weight do you put on the line and how far back from the weight do you then run the baits? I've never done any pushing so I guess I need a whole new tutorial on this technique as well Rees. I just started to get the hang of trolling the baits so pushing will be all new stuff. What kind of weights do you use and how do you rig them to the line?

Just as a note, pushing with the weight really does not help with the type of grass that is on Guntersville. The grass is typically in such big globs that it catches on the weight, bows your rod like you have a 10# bass, and eventually pulls the weight and crankbait towards the surface. You may have different results than I though.

Thanks Scott. Most all the grass I was snagging Sunday was surface grass floating around. I suspect some of it would have been sub surface too, but most of it was floating mats.

I am talking about the surface grass. It runs down the line to the weight since the grass is so long. It is not like your typical floating leaves and "tree worms".