BM 4/20/12

Tried BM yesterday; TMO since I still haven't gotten a smaller motor. I did get another battery, though. It was real foggy in the morning, and the water at the ramp was 72 degrees:



I only fished the first two large areas, up from the dam. I caught 13 crappie, 1 yellow perch, and 3 bream in the morning before the fog cleared. Most were caught longlining 1/16 oz jigs tipped with crappie nibbles. They were caught in 16 FOW, where the water goes from 6' to 32". The biggest crappie was 10.5":



It started clearing about 9:30 - 10:00 a.m.:



The fish seemed to stop biting, so I moved close to shore to throw jigs at lay-downs. Nada, except 1 dink, so I went back out to the middle and found tons of fish 25' down in 32 FOW. I couldn't get them to bite a whole lot, but I managed 6 more. It was slow in the afternoon, and I had some time to kill, so I went and dropped some minnows around cover--no luck, even though I was marking fish all around.

I tried a 6' deep spot, (fishing 2' to 3' down) about 6:30 p.m. and the fish turned on in a big way. It was a crappie blitz. I caught 40 fish from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m.--that's a fish every minute and a half. I got multiple triples. For a while, I felt hedonistic, or glutenous. Every time I pushed 4 rigs in the spot, 3 would go off and start dancing. By the time I got those fish off and the rigs reset, I would push back up to the spot and they would go off all over again. In the back of my mind I kept thinking that something that fun surely has to be a sin, immoral, against the law or something...I kept fishing and grinning anyway.

I ended up catching 58 crappie between 8" - 10.5", 6 bream and 1 YP. They liked chartreuse best: BGBS Chartreuse/black pepper and chartreuse/pearl, chartreuse mister twister curly tail, and Kalin's Lemon Merange all did good. Only a handful of the crappie were 8", and only a handful were above 9.5". I kept 19 of the bigger ones, 3 of the bream and the YP. It was too many fish to clean, so please remind me to stick with my 10-fish rule the next time I go:



Here is my starter kit. It is still crude and rudimentary, but I'm workin' it. Nobody cares about this kind of stuff, except for people like us:




Good luck everyone.