My buddy and I have been hitting our backwaters spot for 3 weeks now, twice a week, hoping to find the fall crappie bite having taken off. Not a chance: until yesterday. Basically the water has been far to warm to get things moving but with some recent cool evenings with a steady blow overnight the water has begun to show promise of much cooler temps which, along with available light, have gotten the crappies and sunfish to start moving off the main channel of the big river.
Where we fish there's some current influence from the river and we're on a natural migration route of the fish as they shift into the deeper portions of the backwaters for the winter. Sunfish are a key indicator that this shift is taking place as there are few of them around until the shift begins. We got some very respectable sunfish yesterday, a couple being tape stretchers. Crappies start the shift with the sunfish but seem to dally along the way. We know when the river fish have gotten to our pet fishing spot when those with silver sides appear, as in yesterday. Those with yellowish tinged sides are resident fish that have taken a bit of color from the tannic stained waters found in the backwaters. As a rule the largest crappies make this shift last of all the crappies and yesterday we caught several in the 11 1/2" to 12" range but the true pigs hadn't shown yet so we should start seeing things pick up now. Last night we saw our first hard freeze with 28 degrees locally while the amount of water in the Mississippi River's valley will hold temps a bit warmer but still with temps even in the low 30's it will help to further suck the heat from the water.
The night before last was the full moon but clouded over which I am sure helped our bite along. With days getting shorter on each end now available light will become a more prominent figure in the fall shift and help to move those big guys back to where we fish. I'll take a stab at nexxt Monday being the first 14 incher getting caught.
Typically a northwest wind sucks at this location but yesterday it didn't hamper things much until about 9 when it really ramped up but by then the bite window had closed. Fishing 1/24 jigs with trimmed keeper wires and 1.5" Thump-Its under a float at about 5 feet in 11 to 17 feet of water got the numbers of fish. The tighter to vertical structure the better. Fishing the same plastic on a 1/16 head without a float took the largest fish over the same water depths when counted down to maybe 5 or 6 and slowly retrieved. Hits were solid fishing both ways. Purple/chartreuse tails and junebug/chartreuse tails took 99% of our fish. One 5 pound Northern was also caught by none other than me. We started fishing while it was still black dark and having Nanofil line on my floatless rod really helped to feel the hits, but a sudden weight was pretty obvious too.
Again on this trip we found that our plastics being soaked in a bag with Gulp juice really moved our hooking percentages way up, but being quick to switch from purple bait to the junebug bait helped a lot. Preference of bait color switched back and forth a couple distinct times as peeks of sun popped thru the cloud cover for ten minutes then disappeared again. The colors are so close but it mattered. Also in addition to the Gulp soaked plastics I had a bag with the same baits/colors done with the Hands On Triple Threat scent and tried these side by side with the Gulp and its was about 50/50 for the two scents. 70% scented to 30% unscented was the ratio for when we tried the unscented variety. The fish still hit them but the hook-ups were far better with the scented.
Between the two of us in two hours we caught a ton of fish with periods of a fish each cast occuring early on. All of our best fish came while still relatively dark to within a half hour of sunrise with the bulk of the fish coming right after sunrise to about 830 when the window began closing. So finally we are seeing the fall crappie bite that I live for.
