Help me find where the Crappie have gone in my river!
Hi Everyone,
Im new to the site and this is my first season of serious fishing, ive been trying to learn as much as I can and have been fishing like crazy for the past year or so. I had a question about the Crappie location in my river and was hoping some of you more experienced anglers could help me out.
I live in Coalinga,Ca and we have a small river (The Kings River) that runs about 30 minutes from my house and this is where I fish most of the time, the past few months have been pretty good and I was finally learning where the crappie are usually at in this river, there are a bunch of regulars that I learned a few spots from, basically we have 4 or 5 areas that most people fish and sometimes there are fish sometimes not. One particular spot being under a bridge in about 6 or 7 foot of water.
This is where I got my first crappie on a jig and usually in an 8 hour day I can get 3 crappies here on jigs if im lucky (which is good for me ) If they aren’t at the bridge ill go from spot to spot until I find where they are but I only know the spots most people fish and im limited to shore angling as I don’t have a boat yet.
I want to point out also that this river is stained water, at max about 9 feet deep and the current varies but its usually pretty slow in most parts. Also, ALL of the structures people seem to fish around here are leftover bridge piling and bits of concrete that are on the sides of the bank and into the shoreline. There is a dam with some trees overhanging the short with tunbleweeds on the bottom but all I ever seem to see here is carp tho I may not be fishing it right.
Most days I was pretty confident I could catch at least one slab under the bridge, and thing where going well until all of the sudden last weekend it started to get really hot here all of the sudden, its now about 80-85 here. Now the crappie seem to have vanished?? I cannot find them in ANY of my old spots despite fishing for long times there, im assuming they are spawning? And ive been told this is the BEST time of the year to find crappie but for the life of me I don’t know where to look, we have some weedy shorlines but the bottom is muddy.
So, If any of you more experienced anglers could give me some tips or ideas that might help me find some crappie during this time of the year or even just point me in the right direction I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks Again for listening!
-Chad Corrin, http://www.facebook.com/ChadMCorrin : My Facebook page