How is Patoka Lookin for this weekend?

[Tim The Lippa Rippa Mon]

Well, here I am again - chomping at the bit to get back down to one of my favorite fishin holes. Pay-Toka! :D LOL! Anyone been fishin there this week? Any sugestions or reports would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

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[Patrick Vowell]

it sux,,,,, stay home,,, hehe

[Tim The Lippa Rippa Mon]

it sux,,,,, stay home,,, hehe

You mean they are drawing water again? :p :rolleyes:

You know better than that Pat. We are comin! We will be staying at Michael T's in French Lick. Give Bart or I a call on our cells before the seminar so we can hook up. Hope you do almost as good as Bart and I do during the tourny! LOL!

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[Moose1am]

OK guys who is attending the seminar on Friday night? What happens at those seminars? I am tempted to attend just to see what goes on. I am only an hours drive from the lake and usually just drive up for the afternoon to watch the weigh-in. I still have a black crappie that I got from someone last Oct at the 2003 weigh-in. I have raised that black crappie in my aquarium all year long. He is getting much larger now.

I am thinking that the crappie usa tournament is this coming Saturday.

The water level is dropping very slowly. It was at 534.5 or something very close to that. The thermocline is at 19ft on Sept 15th. The Dissolved oxygen went from 7.0 to 0.9 from 19ft to 20ft. So there was Little dissolved oxygen below 20ft. At 21 feet it dropped to zero. I suspect that reading was taken up near the damn. Not sure what the thermocline will be like in the upper reaches of the lake (Walls Ramp).

The flow though the damn was not very fast. They are slowly dropping the lake from summer pool which was 536ft amsl. The lake has been high all summer long.

When the water gets low (Winter Pool) you can easily follow the old river channel from Walls Lake boat ramp to the King's Bridge area. Not sure if the crappie will be up that far in the lake during the fall as they are in the spring but they could be. The water up there should be cleaner than normal as we have not had much rain this Sept. It's the driest Sept we have had in a very long time.

This summer they were catching the crappie in deep water on some underwater humps. Not sure where the big slabs are now though. That is why I want to drive up and see where all the big crappie are being caught.

I think I will check out the CrappieUSA web site and see what the results were from last year Patoka Lake Fall tournament.


Good luck to both of you guys if you are entered in the tournement.

There are some guys from Birdeye IN that do well each year. And then there are some guys from Ft Branch IN that also do well each year.

You mean they are drawing water again? :p :rolleyes:

You know better than that Pat. We are comin! We will be staying at Michael T's in French Lick. Give Bart or I a call on our cells before the seminar so we can hook up. Hope you do almost as good as Bart and I do during the tourny! LOL!

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[Moose1am]

We have not had much rain this Sept so if it rains is could change everything. I hope that it does not rain very much. A little drizzle would not hurt the fishing.

[Moose1am]

http://www.crappieusa.com/results/re...rnament_ID=158

I noticed that Brian Estridge fished the tournament last fall and came in third. He use to fish with Frank Ison of Louisville KY and won the spring Patoka Crappie USA tournaments two years in a row. They won in 2003 and in 2002. I know exactly where they fish. Even though I know where they caught their fish I can't duplicate their catch for some reason. LOL Timing is everything though. I have yet to fish that spot in the early morning hours at the right time of the year. April 2 in 2003 the big crappie were in that spot. Now I have an even better map of that spot that shows the true layout of the land. I did notice that there is an old lake that is out from the shoreline in the area that does not show up on any other topo maps of the area.

I am in the process of trying to scan some nice maps to make digital copies of them. These maps are highly detailed and show the elevations in 5ft increments. In some areas they show the elevations at 2.5 ft increments with dashed or dotted lines. There maps are based on the Indiana Plane Coordiante System and need to be converted to UTM coordinates. I plan on eventually getting these maps scanned and spliced back together into usable files. Right now I have to scan each page four times to get all the map into the computer. I am having problems figuring out how to digitally splice these map scans back together into one page or file. If I had a registered copy of OziExplorer I could get some of these maps calibrated and then find some long and lat of some good looking fishing spots. Right now the files are in Paint Shop Pro 8.1 version file format. I saved them in that format so that I could use the features in PSP8 to manipulate the maps. They are scanned in full color and at 600 dpi resolution. The originals will be backed up digitally on an external WD 120gig hard drive for safe keeping. Each section of the map has about 100mb of information in each fiile. I plan on eventually scaling the map resolution down to around 150dpi or even down to 72 dpi as that is all that is needed to view them on a computer screen. That will solve the file size problem. If I can figure out how to stitch these scans back into one big panaroma or complete map page then that will help. This project is bigger and harder than I though it would be. But nothing comes easy.
Eventually I plan to get them into a Tiff file format so that I can import them into OziExplorer and then calibate them. Once that is done I can find spots that look good on the map and then get some UTM coordiantes to program into a gps unit. Once on the lake I can goto those way points using the GPS and get within 10ft of the spot. From there a marker bouy can be dropped into the water and a search started around the bouy using the depth finder.

LOL Yesterday I saw a guy using marker buoys. I mean BIG MARKER BOUYs. There were huge and could be seen easily from 1000 yards away. They were bright Yellow and Bright LIME GREEN and were made out of huge FUN NOODLE sections. They must have been 12" in diameter fun noodles and the guy that made them cut them about 2ft long. He put out a row of these at Patoka Lake right across a bay where we were fishing for crappie. The Crappie USA ACA tournament was taking place yesterday Oct 9th on Patoka Lake and maybe he was fishing the tournament and was marking a drop off or something. He spent about 30 minutes marking the drop off for about 200 yds and then started to fish with his mate. (Lady in the straw hat). They fished there for an hour or so. Also ran into Patrick at this spot. We caught several nice crappie and moved to a new spot. Patrick was fishing with his young 8 year old son. It was his son's first tournament at Patoka Lake and he was having a ball. It's good to see a father and son fishing together like that. I think that after we moved off they said that they caught a few crappie. Most of our crappie were caught between 9:30 and 10:00 am that day. According to my GPS unit's solunar tables the best fishing for that day was around 8 to 10 am. So we caught the very end of the best fishing time. It's funny because by 10:30 or 11 am the crappie turned off completely. We didn't catch anymore fish until around 1:30 that day which was another good time according to the solunar tables. A coinsident? maybe or maybe not!

I was told that the crappie bite was better after the sun came up by a good friend and so we had a big breakfast around 7 am that day and didn't go out on the lake until around 8:30 am or 9am. We caught 25 nice sized crappie yesterday. According to my ruler the largest were only 10" long but they weighed about 1/2 to 3/4lbs. I filleted them with my new American Angler 12VDC electric filet knife and had all of them finished in less than 30 minutes. We ended up with a large tupperware container full of crappie filets. The day was overcast but warm and calm. It was a very nice day to be out on Patoka Lake. We were in short sleeve shirts by 10 am and not overheating at all. It was very comfortable and a great day to be out on the water. I only wish that we had signed up to fish the Tournament as I bet we could have done pretty well. But we fished for fun and caught fish which is all the really counts.


I need to find someone that is good at computer graphics to help me figure out how to get this done. I can scan these maps but I can't for the life of me figure out how to splice them back together again. Not yet anyway.

Note: Tim Gibson who guides on Patoka Lake has not published any fishing reports on the net that I can find. So it's up to us to post any information on Patoka Lake.

[Moose1am]

Here is a photo of one of the guys that fish's Patoka Lake for crappie and does pretty good. He is one of the locals.

[Tim The Lippa Rippa Mon]

The seminar just goes over rules mostly. Some door prices are given away to door tickets holders. Can only get those by entering. The pic you posted is of a very good fisherman that I compete against regularly- the Laake & Rohl team. They are tough competion, and real nice guys.

Expect the weight to go over 10lbs for 10 fish.

I'd be interested to learn this area you were referring to. We already have a tenative game plan in mind though. Thanks for the heads up on the lake conditions. May be we will see each other there. Listen for Tirpak & Fahrenkrog, thats us.

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