Mined Wildlife Question

[fishingtim]

I'm planning a trip to the Mine Wildlife pits in a couple weeks to do some crappie and bass fishing. I've fished at the pond east of West Mineral and the pit right by Big Brutus, and look forward to exploring some of the other pits.
Does anyone have any recomendations of what pits I should try for crappie and or bass. I'm not looking for gps coordinates of brush piles or what bank I should fish. I assume every pit has fish in it, but would hate spend half a day fishing the pit that is know as the 'dead sea', or the pit that has a million four inch crappie in it. Otherwise the plan is to get a map, get a dart, throw the dart at the map and go fishing.

Thanks,
tim

[Fuzzy Grub]

The pit that they stock trout in has had the State record Bass, and Channel Catfish caught out of it. If you are looking for big bass go there and pick up one of those big trout plastic baits and chuck it. You mignt have a new state record bass with any luck!!

[fishingtim]

That makes since a previous state record bass came from there, all the big bass lakes in California have trout swimming around in them, good food source for bass. I don't do much trout fishing so I'll probably skip that pit since I'd have to buy a trout stamp for everyone even if we are bass fishing in that pit. :-(
Thanks for the reply.

[kpflumm]

Ive done really well on crappie and bass in the pits just north of Pittsburg. The first one you come up on looks more like a creek, but i spent many hours hauling in nice crappie instead of class haha.

[BuckCreekMike]

I went to scollege at Pitt Sate, and fished all around the public pits, but mostly for bass, and with minimal results. One time we did find a little pit that was near some big ones that seemed kind of overlooked and caught some nice slabs out of it. If you can get one of the maps that show the pits, and compare that to a satelite image of the area you might be able to locate a few lesser known pits. It has been 8 years or more since I've fished there, so I can't be much help on specific pits. One thing I do know is that the majority of the pits seemed to not have much visible cover around the shoreline, but if you do find some laydowns or something you should definitely try them. It wouldn't hurt to have minnows with you either. You can get some at what used to be called Bo's 1 Stop on 4th street on the bypass. Good luck.