Crappie Masters. View from the bottom up.
For Carol and I the Crappie Masters National Championship was an amazing experience. It has given us new respect for those that paid their dues and caught good fish during the tournament. Congratulations to our fellow Crappie.com members luvpt and Blue thunder, arkcrappie and Christie, BRM and meatgetter, Crappie Greg and Arkansasbowhunter. Let me tell you, these guys can fish and competed well with some of the best crappie fishermen in the world. It was an extremely tough bite due to weather and water changes just prior to the tournament and everyone seemed to be scrambling to make last minute changes in the way they were going to fish.
Our prefishing consisted of arriving at the lake on Wednesday morning knowing that due to tournament regulations, we were only going to get to pre-fish a half day then, and a full day the Thursday before the tournament. We launched Wednesday morning and immediately crashed into BRM’s boat. This would have been an awesome start if it were Nascar. We felt really bad about it and BRM held his tongue and did his best to make us not feel as bad as we did about it. Not a great start to a day of fishing and hoped it wasn't an indicator of things to come. Armed only with minimal information, a general area they had bit the week before, a good jig color, and one waypoint we marked from Crappie.com spring camp a couple years ago, we set out to find a fish.
The waypoint from a couple years ago still had fish on it, so we caught a couple and moved on to try and find other fish. We fished the rest of the morning with only 1 other crappie caught. We spoke to several other people, who had similar luck trolling, and knowing that the lake still had plenty of big crappie in it, decided to try jigging the trees the following morning. The following day after jigging the trees until mid morning and only catching one fish, we changed tactics to power trolling with cranks to try and cover more water since prefishing time was running out. We had 3 more crappie bites and were able to verify some quantities with the sonar. We marked one stick up that looked like a rake handle in the middle of a 10 fow flat that was holding good quantities of fish, hopefully crappie, and the general area we were tipped about, had fish on it, as well as several other boats. At the end of thursday, we had a plan of how we were going to fish, what to fish with, and 3 areas to fish on lake Washington. We had heard of some better fishing on a couple of other eligible lakes, but chose to stay with what we already knew rather than fish completely blind.
Thursday night, we decided to eat good, so we visited Doe’s in downtown Greenville. As I climbed out of the car, I was met with the sound of 2 gunshots. I looked up the street and the security guard was drawing his weapon and waving us across the street at the same time. I was yelling at Carol to get back in the car so we could get the heck out of Dodge, when the owner busted out the front door of the restaurant and started waving us across the street as well. We took off in a low crouch across the street and made it inside with no bloodshed of our own. After sharing a 3 inch thick porterhouse, we came to the conclusion that a steak that good would be worth taking a bullet for providing it was less than a fatal injury.
Friday morning we arrived at the ramp promptly at fishing time, 7am, and found we had the ramp to ourselves. We leisurely motored to the “spring camp hole”, and started catching fish spider rigging a 50 yard square. When that played out, we moved to the rake handle hole and caught a few fish there and decided to call it quits around 1:30pm with 17 fish all near the same size, but with no real slabs. Our fish were checked at Washington where they, for some unknown reason to us, took 2 of our fish. We weighed 5.54 lbs with seven fish and that left us with 8 fish to clean.
Saturday, we planned to do the same thing, and the story was much the same except when we arrived at the “spring camp hole”, no fish were biting on minnows. After fishing a couple of hours with only a couple of fish, we decided to go to jigs in the color that had been suggested to us a few days before, and the bite was on again. We ended up catching several there and hitting the rake handle hole and picking up a few there to give us a total of 15 that seemed to be slightly better fish from .7 lbs to 1.37 lbs. Our second biggest fish was gill hooked and died so we had to make a decision of whether to weigh or not. We decided to keep all our fish and not weigh on Saturday since we are trying to catch enough to provide for 80-100 people by Nov 9th. With no more weight than we had, we would have had no chance of placing, but would be taking up valuable time for others that were competing.
Overall it was an amazing experience. We learned several things and knowing what we know now, would probably do a few things different. Fishing that environment was some of the toughest fishing I had ever experienced, and at the end of each day, I felt like I had been run over by a truck. We met many people and all were extremely nice. The locals were well aware of the tournament and rolled out the red carpet. The cities involved did a great job as well as the Crappie Master staff. Congratulations to all that finished in the money and congratulations to Jerry McCready and partner for weighing no fish on Friday then coming back with the big fish of the tournament on Saturday.
Crappie.com people are some really special people. To get to share a lake and fish with them for a short time is a reward in itself. We are sure thankful for these people who have taught us so much and have been willing to help a fellow out when he has fallen on misfortune. It is through Crappie.com that we were able to fish a couple of Crappie Masters tournaments and meet many good people in this organization as well.
Thanks to all
RCC & Carol
