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Crappies were on, but wierd experiences with the bass
Attachment 196571
Weird experience on the water Tuesday 03/24/2015. Installed a new Minnkota V2 Ipilot trolling and took the toy out on a reservoir north of Sacramento. By the way, that Ipolit remote and its capability of GPS anchoring is sick! Anyhow, the wind was near to none, air temp was 80, and water temp average 51 with warmer temp of 53 in back channel. I found tons of small mouth fanning out nests in the back channel in about 4-5ft of muddy water. You could clearly see bubbles bubbling and water movement around the bubbles everywhere. Thought they were crappies so started single pole jigging directly into the bubbles. Almost every dip came out an 8-9” small mouth. If you have never seen it, it looks just like small gas leaks inside a pond or lake but with water swirls. Not exaggerating, between the three of us we caught at least 45 basses or more in a 400ft radius sand bar in an hour. Only a handful were actually 12" or more, the rest were 8-9". All were released but completely threw me off. None of them even seemed pregnant and very young so why the heck are they fanning nests? I was told crappies spawn before basses and crappies in NorCal usually do not spawn until late April.
After two hours of non-stop action, I got tired of bass fishing and chased after what I was there to do. Catch crappies for dinner. Using my Hummingbird side imaging, I found crappies scattered all over the flats in the middle of the lake. They were NOT bunched up, again, wierd. They SHOULD be bunched up staging to spawn. From 3pm-5pm, we slow trolled with 16ft cane poles (California spider Riggn style) with multiple different styles and colors of jigs. Mind you, we are limited to two cane poles so we hooked up three jigs per pole, legal. We even used live minnows and only caught 2 crappies suspended in 9ft. We know they are there, but they were being lockedjaws. Finally from 7pm-9pm, we landed 28 10' plus crappies bobber fishing back at the channel where we had found those basses. The crappies had moved to the back channel to feed on ghost minnows. We followed the minnows and that is how we located the feeding crappies. All males were jet black but no blood on anal fins so no nest fanning yet. Females were packed with eggs. Wierdest trip ever and so unpredictable.
