Fishing With Ernest

[Jerry Blake]

One of the things I appreciate about Crappie.com is the opportunity it gives me to meet a lot of super people. A few weeks ago while visiting with Ernest Paty in the Chat Room I invited him to come over this way for a little Arkansas Crappie Fishing and he took me up on it. He and his friend Patrick arrived this afternoon and got settled into our bunkhouse. Then Darryl, Grubby, Ernest, Patrick and I went out for about an hour before sundown to see if we could catch a few. Grubby started us off with a 16-inch/2-pound, 2-ounce crappie and we added another 9 that ranged from 14 to 16.25-inches in length before the cold and the darkness caught up with us and we headed in. I tried to take some pictures of our catch but apparently the lens on my camera fogged over and they didn't turn out.

Ernest and Patrick will be fishing with me again tomorrow so we'll get some pictures and keep y'all posted.

[gabowman]

Looking forwards to the pics Jerry. You guys have fun and be careful in the cold.

[CrappieHound]

You guys have some grit fishing in this weather. People tell me I'm crazy! They just don't understand. Good luck...stay safe!

[Jerry Blake]

You guys have some grit fishing in this weather. People tell me I'm crazy! They just don't understand. Good luck...stay safe!

Hey, it got up to 39 here today and we had full sunshine after about 9:00. If it wasn't for the 10-mph wind out of the North it would have been pretty nice.

It is supposed to get down in the teens tonight so we'll let it warm up a bit before we go after them in the morning. It's supposed to get way up into the 40s tomorrow with light winds and sunshine so that will be nice.

[Jerry Blake]

I enjoyed fishing and swapping techniques and stories with Ernest and Patrick today in spite of some tough fishing conditions. We started about 8:45 with a stiff East wind, air temps around 20-degrees and extremely high pressure moving in - got up to 30.63 at noon!!! The air temp never got up to 40 and the wind didn't let up much all day.

We had to fish over 30-feet deep to catch the gooduns this morning and we caught and released over 20-dinks this afternoon but we caught a few more good crappie from 22 to 26-feet deep late in the day. Most of the fish we caught were on jigs but we caught a few on Rosey Red minnows and Shiners and we tipped our jigs with Rosey Red minnows at times.

With the 10 we caught yesterday evening we ended up with a decent mess:

Here's Ernest with our two biggest:

I hope we get a chance to fish together again soon and also hope they don't pick the coldest day of the year again!

[L.A. stumpjumper]

Nice catch Jerry, I bet it was fun fishing with those two.

[SkeeterJeff]

Very nice stringer!! I would have traded you places tho. I went Ice Fishing for the first time in my life today. It was 3 degress when I got on the ice at noon and 8 degrees when I came off just before dark.

Hey, at least we all got to fish today, right?

Jeff

[gabowman]

I can tell by looking at those pics that it was cold there today. Even with that, you guys were able to produce alot of good, quality fish too. With such an impressive stringer of slabs this time of the year I can only imagine what you catch late Febuary/early March! IF I coulda been that fly on the wall today (and not froze to death) I woulda learned more in one day about daytime fishing for crappie than I'll learn the rest of this year. Congrats on hosting a fine fishing trip.

[Phantom309]

Real nice fish ! !

[cms3]

Nice catch Jerry.
Ernest looks cold but I know he had a good time.
Hope it warms up by spring CC

Charlie