Night Fishing, HoresShoe Bend, Lake McClure 5/24/12

[wallrat]

A friend and I spent all night fishing HorseShoe Bend on Lake McClure. I have 2 submersible lights, one is green fluorescent from BPS and the other is Halogen from Amazon. I placed the halogen about 3 feet down and the flouro about 8 feet down. Slowly the food chain showed up for the party. We caught 5 crappie (released on with eggs) and kept 3 (one flipped off at the boat), 3 trout, a black bass, and a handful of sunfish. Both of my minnow sources were either unavailable or out of minnows so we used crappie jigs with Crappie Nibbles. Had we been blessed with minnows and had an odd cold front not moved in, we would surely have caught more. We still had a blast. You can the baitfish moving in, followed by larger fish feeding off them from below on these sonar images. You can literally see the first school of shad moving in with fish following them below. It then gets thicker and thicker as more move in, eventually being solid 11 feet deep. Images are from my 597 CI DI HD and changed to green / black to preserve night vision.

Good luck to everyone!

["G"]

You ought to try the Reel-Lites......all LED's......very low amp draw you can run several lights all night long off of your cranking battery and will still have plenty of battery to start your outboard.

[wallrat]

I did, but the price is far too high for me right now. I have 2 batteries and I ran these off the second battery with no noticeable draw. After a full night of livewell, finder, nav lights, and both lights, my 109ah battery was still at 95%. I have pondered making my own once I'm done lighting the boat, we'll see. Thanks for the suggestion though.

-Bill