Fishing report

[10point]

Fished Sunday afternoon at a Lake I'm not going to mention. Water temp was 42 degrees. Longlined 1/16 oz road runner jigs with baby shad at .5 mph. Caught 20 with some real nice ones. Mostly got them in 15-17 foot of water.

[Firehyd]

WTG! I Like using them road runners too.

[river scum]

x2 on the roadrunners


20 well worth it, good job. you ever try those roadrunners trolled on umbrella rigs?

[HoosierSlabs]

X3 on the road runners

[Moveon]

How do you determine the depth of the jigs when long lining? I'd just keep letting out line until I felt the jig hitting or ticking the bottom on a flat while watching the 2d depth finder and then reel in a few times to get the jigs off the bottom a bit. But that's just a guess. When I troll cranks I use the Precision Trolling Bible which has calibrated different types of lures using various lengths of ten pound mono fishing line out the back of the board. Line length is determined using a accurate line counter reel. It's very precise and I can repeat the depth that I want to fish with different lures. Speed of the boat is not that critical as I can go from 0.5 mph up to 2.0 mph and the lures depth really doesn't change that much. The key is the amount of line out, the line diameter which in turns changes the friction between the line and the water and the type of crank bait and how it's tuned and made. Some cranks will dive deeper than others if they are tuned to run properly.

But I've seen guys fishing with the wind and just drifting down a bay where I know it has a drop off that goes from around 6 to 7 ft down to very deep water. This was in the fall of the year and the guy spend a few hours doing this at Bluegrass Pit before coming back in and showing off the fish he caught. Crappie. Nice ones too. But I didn't see what bait he was using or how he actually was fishing them. Maybe he was fishing a very short line over the top of the weed beds in the shallower waters or maybe he let out more line and fished the deeper drop offs. That time of the year the fish are putting on the feed back to get ready for the long winter so that would tell me he was fishing the shallower waters maybe. But how did he keep the fish from spooking out of the shallow waters when the boat passed over them? As I said he was drifting with the wind so no motor was going.

I've heard some x pert crappie fisherman talk about turning off the depth finder and stopping the pinging so as not to spook the fish. I guess they can still use the map feature/gps without the sonar ping on to see where they are located on the lake and make minor adjustments with quick pulses of the trolling motor or by just using the motor lower unit to steer the boat during the drift. That can be done some what by just turning the steering wheel or the tilt handle on the motor without actually running the motor. The lower unit and prop act like a rudder when you do that and you can some what steer the boat when it's being blown with the wind. I've done that many years ago when we fished without a trolling motor. I would run up the lake into the wind with the main gas motor and shut it off. Then drift back with the wind and use oars to keep the boat going over the known fishing area. The head of islands where we knew that there were lots of good stump beds full of bass at times. Those water were 5ft to 10 ft deep small areas at the head end of the island or the tail ends and along the sides. We would also drift out over very shallow flats at time casting top water baits to small trees that were still growing in spots above the water level on very tiny islands. My first big bass hooked came off one of three small willow trees that were still growing in 3 ft of water on KY lake. This was when the lake was still not at full summer pool. Those trees later died and vanished into the currents over the years. But they still exist in the mind of what once was a young 8 year old kid fishing KY lake for the first few times in the Shannon Creek Area. We fish the hell out of that creek in the old days. Back in the 1960's and well into the early 1980's. Later when I saw the digital map data of this area on a KY lake Lakemaster Map I learned why the area was so good in our favorite spots. The creek channel went though this flat area and the bends in the creek where it dropped off from 3 ft. to 15 f.t were where I caught a lot of good LM bass, Sauger and crappie.