Originally Posted by jfraley
Lights:
I went night stalking on Friday night with a guy from work. Neither of us had ever fished for crappie at night. We got three different types of lights. A 21" Green tube light, another tube light with a light on the bottom shining down, and one that is similiar to a floating head light. The head light one did not seem to help out too much and it drains the batter faster. The green tube light with the light shine down seem to do better than other tube. We started out with the lights right beside the boat and far apart. After we figured out that the rods closes to the lights were the most productive, we tide the lights to the middle of some 12' crappie rods to get them out from the boat and put them closer togeter. That help a lot. We plan on getting more lights. It was obvious that the rods next to the light with the most bait fish got more bites than the others. We did not do go at all on the long rods that were out from the boat and out from the lights. I'm not even going to take them next time.
Any one have a good way to get the lights out and away from the boat?
Fish:
We got their just before dark and right away I was catching fish. My partner had to rig all of his rods up, so I got off to a good head start. I had fish on before I got 3 rods in the water. I plan on getting there earlier next time. The bite was real good at dusk. The fish were biting 8-10' deep. Most of our keepers were caught before 3AM. We caught a total of 22 nice keepers. The biggest was 15.25". A lot of small fish. I felt bad because a lot of the small fish swallowed the hooks and I pretty much killed them getting the hooks out. That sucked. We moved after the bite slowed down and noticed that the water had been lowered a good bit. The next stop didn't produce any keepers,but we must have caught 20 small fish before deciding to call it a night. The second spot didn't have nearly as many bait fish at the lights.
We learned a lot and had a lot of fun. I am looking forward to the next nightstalk. To us it was a good night. Of course we hope to catch more next time, but that is always the case. There several things that we can tweek in our setup. Like the positioning and number of lights, position of rod holders ect. Rango's article was very helpful. Thanks Rango!
