Sorry the fish weren't cooperating but thanks for post and pics!!
First of all, I want to thank CatchNgrease for his willingness to share info to someone like me who had never been on Wheeler before. You guys have a beautiful massive lake and we only saw a very small portion of it around the Decatur area. We ran some six miles below and six miles above our hotel.
From the videos that I watched on Wheeler concerning crappie fishing seem to indicate that most of the crappie were in shallow water at this time of the year and from CatchNgrease suggestions, I don’t doubt that for a moment. However, my fishing buddy, Dr Phil Gawthrop, wanted to look for Smallmouth a lot and so a lot of our time on the water was spent running and throwing various lures for the Smallies to no avail. What can I say? I’M a crappie fisherman. Lolol.
With the current flow around 74,000 cfs and lake at winter level, I was reluctant to hit shallow water very much, so when we decided to crappie fish some, so we ran to Limestone creek and idled through the narrow creek for a couple hundred yards watching the graph.
We saw several fish scattered along that stretch of water and small schools occasionally that we marked and then fished for. Water was around 16-17 feet deep mostly where we fished. We caught a few crappie the first afternoon on Bobby Garland Lights Out Minnow Mind’Rs and Green Lantern Mo Glo baits.
It turned very cold (24 degrees) overnight so we waited until about 11 am to even go out and bass fish for a while before giving up and going back to Limestone to fish for the fish that we saw the day before. What a difference in water temp we found. On the main river outside Limestone, my graph read 45.5, but up in the creek a couple hundred yards it was 40 degrees and the fish had lockjaw.
I did managed to finally catch 3 up to 12” long but had to dead stick an Eclipse Bobby Garland Slab R for an eternity before they would finally bite. I really enjoyed my first trip to Wheeler. Beautiful lake and I know you guys are proud of it.
Sorry the fish weren't cooperating but thanks for post and pics!!
drumking thanked you for this post
Glad you got to get out and get after them some, wish you would have had some better weather.
drumking thanked you for this post
If you come back around March you should be able to get a mess in either Flint creek or Limestone creek and have a blast doing it
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Wishing everyone hard hits tight lines and heavy stringersdrumking thanked you for this post
I was honored to be able to help what little I could. I hate y'all had such tough sledding conditions.
Sent from my E6810 using Crappie.com Fishing mobile app
Great report and fighting though challenging conditions. Seems winter keeps getting harder to fish as I get older.
drumking thanked you for this post
Where did ya'll stay?
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Livescope Terrova 24v Ionic lithium batteriesdrumking thanked you for this post