tried the local lake today

[ctom]

My buddy Tom and I were out early on a lake just north of town yesterday. This lake has been a tough one to get to take off this year. Repeated dumpings of heavy rain have had it up and down like a yo-yo and the high water has been cold. We found temps from 54 to 58 degrees with the 58 only in one small, secluded bay. Crappies were able to be caught but it was a real specific bite.

Every fish we caught came off a break from shallow shoreline water to deeper water and when I say off the break, I mean right where that break begins to drop and if there wasn't some sort of vertical structure right there, forget it. Shoreline having large rock that extended down into the water was best as long as a dock posts or maybe a tree stump in the water at the break was present. Deep water without the break where the structure was empty water. It was just a weird spring scenario for crappies.

We have a string of nice days forecast now so perhaps the water will take some heat and the crappies fall into a more predictable pattern. We definitely need some heat down deep as the water was only at 51 degrees at 8 feet wherever we dropped the thermometer on the cord. The male crappies we brought home had zero evidence of getting darker and the one hen fish's spawn skeins were hard and way under-developed.

[Fishermanbt]

I too ran into a weird crappie bite last Friday on my local lake. In the 4 hours I fished I just could not seem to locate them consistently. One or two little ones here and there. Water was around 63°. My daughter and I fished our farm pond on Monday evening and found the crappie were right on the banks. I assume nested up. Some were taken on small plastics while a few were aggressive enough to tackle a nose hooked 4” Wutz-It split tail. All were colored up real nice too.

[ctom]

We did the same lake on Thursday and with similar results, only we did catch a few more fish. Our big thing has been water temperature. Thursday we could not find water warmer than 56 degrees.

The fish we marked were well out over open deep water, suspended. The fish we caught were off the rock again, which sort of has me thinking they will stage even if the water is cool. The males took a little color on, but not very black yet. The one hen we kept had spawn that was still immature and fairly firm.

On a positive note, the dirty water has moved further down stream and we actually found maybe three feet of clarity in the upper lake area where we launch and begin our fishing each day. The middle and lower lake which were relatively clean a couple weeks ago were chocolate milk Thursday. The high water is beginning to come down as well which will benefit everything.