I'm not ashamed to say it but Lake Oconee has shown me just how good a crappie fisherman I really am. She has humbled me and worse yet she has humiliated me all summer long. Kowboy and I caught 19 good fish on June 29 and since then it has been a train wreck. We have made several trips since June that we did not even catch a keeper fish. We could find some fish but the ones we did catch were small. Yesterday we put in at Sugar Creek and started south. We checked for fish in the channel alongside the timber and did not mark any. We moved to the middle of the lake and marked a good many in water anywhere from 10-25 feet. We pushed minnows out of the front of the boat and long lined jigs tipped with minnows out of the back of the boat. We caught one 11 inch fish from the time we started fishing at around 7:45 until mid morning. We also found some fish on brush and downed timber but could only get the small ones to bite. We moved again and finally found good numbers of fish around noon in the timber close to where the river makes a left turn. We finished the day at that spot and kept six fish with the biggest being 12 inches. We caught these fishing slow trolling minnows over timber. We probably caught 20-25 fish and had lots of action but most of the fish were about 9 inches long. The fish preferred their minnow on a #2 aberdeen hook. The water temperature was about 80 degrees when we started and 83-84 when we quit. We did catch one keeper under a dock and probably should have spent more time checking docks. However, someone made the comment on this forum last spring that they didn't like to have to fish the way they didn't want to fish (or something like that). We are the same way. Stubborn! I'm a slow learner.
