Chickamauga Lake Crappie Report: 01/18/2017

[drumking]

I played Santa Claus for myself this year and got a new Helix 7 SI-DI GPS combo unit for the console of my G3. Today, I took the boat out and played with the unit for a while, marking stuff as I went along and looking at other points that I have marked on the other unit that I have. Getting familiar with the Hummingbird as I have had Lowrance units for a long time. I like the graphics so far and I am hoping that I can hide some of the screens that you have to go through to get to the ones that you want to use. The instruction manual has to be down loading from the website. That is a bummer, but I guess it is a way for Hummingbird to save a little money on manuals.

My good friend, Cuonthelake called me after I had been out for a while and she was ready to try some long lining for crappie. So, I picked her up at the dock and we began to long line with curly tail grubs. The creek area that we started out in was void of baitfish and crappie, so we eased out to the main lake and put our lines out and set the speed that we wanted and just enjoyed conversation and the pleasant weather that we had today for the 18th of January.

Before very long, Candi told me that I should stop the boat as she had a big fish on. I hit spot lock on the I-Pilot and watched her reel in a very nice White Bass. She thought it was a catfish for a while, but it was a boat paddle sized fish. Then we continued on and I got a phone call and as I was speaking, my rod was almost jerked out of my hand by a very chunky yellow bass. We fished a little while longer with this technique without a crappie bite, so we decided to go fish docks. The first dock, my best student, caught an 11" black crappie before I even picked up a rod. Then she pulled out another keeper (10.25") and they must have been the only two fish on that dock. Grin.

To make a long story short, we fished various structures without anymore bites from crappie. I took her back to the dock and put my boat back on the trailer. End of story. Grin. A bad day of fishing is still better than a good day at work.