Underwater camera observation....

I have fished a boat dock twice this week without getting a bite, the first time while fishing alone and today while fishing with two other guys. Saw an enormous pod of fish (Crappie) on my side scan and confirmed that there were lots of fish under the dock with my Active Target. After fishing today for 15 or 20 minutes without a bite, the other guys started poo pooing and decided that it was bait, that they were carp, etc. etc.. Having seen (and caught) enough Crappie under docks to know how they sit, associate with each other, etc., I was completely confident that they were Crappie and that there were a lot of them, but purely out of curiosity (and to confirm for the other guys that they were in fact Crappie), I pulled out my underwater camera and deployed it under the dock.

Geez Louise, hundreds of them and they all appeared to be about the same size (10-12") and they were all absolutely sedentary, just lying there passing the time. Not only were they completely disinterested in several different size and colors of plastic tails on jigs, but they weren't even really bothered by the camera lens being dropped down through them. It just goes to show that most sport fish are inactive far more often than they're actively feeding and when they're like this, there's little you can do to change it.

Can you share the camera footage with us?

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Originally Posted by NCkenner

Can you share the camera footage with us?

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Unfortunately, my camera doesn't take video and I was too dense to simply ask my brother (who was standing there watching it with me), to pull out his cell phone and take video. I'll find an opportunity to do it again soon and will definitely take a short video though. It was very cool.

Seen that very same reaction, err rather "inaction", several times when using Livescope. You'd think that with a school of Crappie holding in a "feeding position", that if you introduced a jig or a minner in their zone they'd be fighting each other for position to get to it. Nope, not at all, in almost every case. You might tempt one or two or three of them to come check it out, but the majority of them will simply just hold their current position ... like nothing's happening.

What really amazes me though is when you do hook one and yank it out of the school, the others just seem to shrug it off and go on about their business. Then you pitch your bait back into the school and yank out another, rinse/repeat, and they still stay schooled on the cover. Of course, there are other times when just putting the bait in the vicinity of the school will scatter them, or catching the first one puts the rest of the school on high alert or shuts them down completely. Unpredictable fish, to say the least, and that's what makes it so much fun to figure them out & put a few in the boat. :ThumbsUp

Very common, I’ve watched this sense I was old enough to go with dad ice fishing watching down the 2’x2’ holes in a dark house. I’ve had cameras the last 20 plus years fish behavior is something I’ll never fully understand. Sometimes there’ll be Sunny’s stacked on the camera and a Northern pike will drift through the school and they’ll barely move out of the way, ten minutes later it will drift through and they all scatter, this will go on all day long.lol.