Watkins Mill no worse than Smithville 12-6-09

[keeferfish]

Much more of the same, a lot of shorts but had a good time.

Never crappie fished Watkins before but much like Smithville I caught fish on every pile I fished. Unlike Smithville I had the lake to myself on a Weekend, very peaceful.

Had some issues when I pulled to the ramp I turned on my handheld GPS only to find when I had been jacking with it at the house and tried to erase my past tracks; I actually erased everything on it. Now how the heck am I’m going to find the piles? Well I logged on to the net with my blackberry and was unable to log on to crappie.com and could see the home page but not log on, so I did a google search for Watkins which led me to the MDC site and was able to enter coordinates and find some brush. Isn’t technology great! I'm lucky everything is backed up on my computer.

Below are a couple of pics of my son getting into the action and a couple of the nicer fish. All in All a good day just not worth getting the knife dirty.

[APKape]

Good job on the day. I visited the lake about 3 weeks ago. Very clean, and well kepts. Wish I could have joined you. Better day than I had.

[frogy61]

First time I've seen anything on here from Watkins. I've been up there bass fishing a bunch, but never tried to hard for crappie. I had heard the fishing went down hill pretty bad after the dam work a couple of years ago...hopefully it's still on a recovery. I was thinking about hitting it up in the spring.

[olesilverside]

nice to see the young man with an auto inflatable on..... very smart in the cold conditions.......

[got crappie]

good job young man. Dave

[Pole Bender]

Looks you and the young man had a great time!

[beagle man]

outstanding day sir, nice to see a good post in the cold weather fishing season, guess I will have to get the long johns out

[MOfishmgr]

Watkins has tons of crappie in it. Unfortunately it's like many smaller lakes and the crappie are stunted. There are some that reach good size and we saw several 13-inch+ fish this past spring. One major difference from Smithville is the crappie regulation. You can keep 30 per day of any size. And please do. Crappie fishing is best in small lakes when they are heavily harvested. I usually take about 120 a spring out of it. It's a little tougher filleting 8-inch fish, but with the limit being 30, it's worth it. Glad to see the brushpiles are getting some use.

[gatorbitu]

Great job to you and son! Congrats

[TnRidge]

Congrats on the catch . I like to see the kids getting in on the action too.