Thread: cold windy and somehow managed an awesome day

Well I walked out the front door this morning and it was windy, cold and felt like it was gonna rain so I went in to check the weather and no rain forecasted. Went back outside and stood there trying to talk myself out of a windy fishing morning. well it didn't work so off i went. went to where I got a limit yesterday and the wind was terrible. Could only fish one side of the area and even that was hard. Struggled for over two hours and only caught 3. Decided to go find an area sheltered from the wind and found a small cove that looked pretty good so tried it. Caught one small one going in, but nothing past the entrance, plus it was to shallow. Decided to give up and on the way back to the ramp saw someone long lining. Got closer and saw it was a guide I see pretty regular this time of year, cant remember his name but its on his truck. Anyway I start setting up to troll and see them catch another. I see them catch 2 more and I finally caught one. After being there 20 minutes, i'm trolling in the opposite direction (keeping my space) and I turn around and they are gone. Don't know if they had a limit or went somewhere else but it was only about 10am and there was 3 of them so I doubt they limited out.

Well I keep going and I see small streams of shad in the 12 to 15ft range and miss a few fish. Now I hear a lot of people say color don't matter a lot when long lining but I've seen what was about to happen to me to many times to believe it.

I decide to put a lighter color on one pole and within minutes I catch a fish (color is in pic below). I cast back out and boom another fish. Well I slowly start changing more poles and I'm catching them pretty steady and even 3 or 4 doubles. At one point I had 4 crappie laying on the floor because I didnt have time to put them in the live well. Anyway in the next 2 hours I caught 27 crappie. UNREAL! Almost everyone was 12" and the biggest was just short of 15" and weighed 2.5lbs. I was trolling between .8 and 1.1mph depending on the wind. The graph pic below is what I was seeing when catching fish. I did have a lot of misses as well. Dont know why. I grab the pole and before I could do anything the fish was gone. The ones I did catch were really fighting. Anyway thats 3 limits in a row (Fri, Mon and Tue). I never would have believed it after the first two hours. Fished from 7am to 1pm water temp was around 46 and 3 turbines were running. A GREAT DAY!