73 Today

Walt & I once again applied our drifting technique after a severe cold front and prior to the upcoming hectic holiday. Winds were out of the NNW at between 10 - 15 mph with gusts over 20 mph. Partly cloudy. Warm. We drifted (2 rods each) with tubes, curly tails, Roadrunners and straight tails. The straight tails out-performed everything else (dressed on the 1/8 oz. heads), with the tubes (1/16 oz. inserted tube heads) coming in second. The 2" curly tails & 1/16 oz. Roadrunners attracted the most bluegill bites. Out of the 73 that we caught & released, about 2/3's were crappie with the rest being gills. Here are some pics from today:

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No giants today. The last one here that Walt got was on par with the largest for today. We were moving along at a pretty good clip and the 1/16 oz. & 1/8 oz. jigs were pretty high in the water column. The fish didn't seem to care and the bite was pretty constant with 3 doubles and 2 triples. A decent day to be on the water for about 6 hours of fishing. :)

Wow.....good job guys

Does anyone else ever use this method? So do you mark fish on the locator, drop a buoy and drift the area over and over or what? I mean how do you choose your drift area? I am pretty fascinated with this.

Believe it or not, this impoundment is not all that big. Maybe 200 acres or there abouts. The main basin is is like a fish bowl with little or no structure per say. We know the crappie are there. One end of the lake or the other may produce more than another, depending on wind direction, but it still amazes me with the effectiveness that "speed drifting" affords us. We just go up-wind and drift back, or side to side, again depending on the wind. We don't even to bother with buoys, as we can drift the entire lake in about a 1/2 hour - again, depending on the wind.

Most of the crappie we see on the sonar are 10' - 15' down (as shown above). How they find our baits flying by overhead baffles me sometimes! Most of our success is with straight tails too, which is equally surprising, as the water clarity is only about 3' - 4' max. as I've said. But we don't look a gift horse in the mouth!

I'd probably drop buoys on larger impoundments, but for this one, the crappie are everywhere. And the pressure is relatively heavy too. They close the res to fishing for the fall & winter months, opening only from April to October, so that may be why the population sustains itself quite well. Lots of bait fish too.

Thanks a lot Crestliner. I am definitely looking forward to trying this method here on one of our 40,000 acre impoundments but I will mark some fish before I start. They just have too many options to hide from me on these lakes.

Great pics and a great day!!!!!!

Sounds great! That's a lot of fish! There's only one pond I know of in my neck of the woods where I could imagine catching that many crappie, and those would all be pretty small.