Lake Murray Report 3/9/17 and 3/11/17
Well another season of club tournaments is in the books for the South Carolina Crappie Association. Yesterday we had our Classic on Lake Murray for the grand finale. The Classic is the big money event for the year and teams have to qualify over the course of the season to fish it. We had a total of 13 teams qualify this year and 10 fished it. Payouts ranged from $3200 for first place down to $500 for fifth place so everyone was working hard to have a good day. The lake was off limits for two weeks prior to the event and Thursday and Friday were the two allowed practice days.
Thursday morning my dad joined me and we unloaded the boat at 7 AM. Conditions were absolutely perfect for finding the big girls, but we had a tough day. We were targeting big females that we hoped had made their way into the backs of the creeks. Our method of choice was pushing jigs and minnows. We fished this pattern and covered 4-5 different areas thoroughly before giving up shortly after lunch. The creeks weren't holding any fish for us and only a few were caught. We swapped over to jigging and found things to be a little better, but we still didn't find exactly what we were hoping for. None the less, we kept 10 nice crappie for our efforts and atleast figured out what we didn't need to do Saturday. Our biggest was a 1.86 lb beauty that happened to be the first fish of the morning. Fish were caught from 5-15 FOW.
I had to work Friday, so my next day on the water was tournament day. Long line trolling was the method of choice for me and my partner. We fished from 7 AM - 3 PM and caught fish sporadically all day with plenty of bait changes. We targeted creeks again but this time focused on depths of water 10-25 ft. The fish were very scattered and we never run across any schools of big fish. Luckily, with 8 min to fish we boated our big fish of the day at 1.9lb and that fish helped us squeak out a 5th place finish. We ended up keeping 20 fish and our top 7 weighed 10.75. As you can see from the weigh-in board below, some big fish were caught Saturday!! This is the second event in a row that it's taken over 14lb to win on Murray!
Thanks to everyone with SCCA for everything they do to put the tournaments on. You won't find a finer bunch of fishermen and fisherwoman anywhere around.
Tight Lines to All!
A couple from Thursday's trip.
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