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Crankbait pulling on The Rez with some wind 5/4
As the title states, my son and I went fishing this afternoon pulling crankbaits. Despite the cooler temperatures, the water surface temp was still 76-78 degrees F, and I was seeing plenty of fish on the 8-14’ contours. While I also saw plenty of fish deeper and shallower, I still followed a 10-12’ contour targeting suspended and bottom hugging fish in the 8-14’ depths. We landed 8 crappie in spurts and did good keeping the 7-10 mph wind to our backs for the most part; with the higher gusts that may have been greater than 10 mph, we also had issues with the water white capping at times. To break the monotony, my son also landed this 17.5”, 2lb-10oz bass, and I caught this is 4lb catfish. We also had to deal with a lot of pleasure boating, adding to some instability at times.
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For those who wonder if you have enough trolling motor and battery to troll at 1.5 mph, with this much wind at my back, my Ultrex cruise was set to 1.5 mph, and the resulting prop speed setting floated between 1.5 and 4.5 for the most part. Going against the wind, I saw prop speed as high as 8, although I tend to try to troll with the wind to keep the boat slap noise to a minimum. My 24V Ultrex used 25% of my batteries (two 100Ah Lithium 12V batteries in series) on this trip, which falls in line with my typical 20-35Ah consumption, depending on how long I fish and how much wind that I deal with. Generally, I can go two trips between charges on my trolling motor Lithium batteries pulling crankbaits and can go more if I’m jigging or spider rigging.
