Monday morning crappie - Tennessee

Mr S was willing to go fishing with me this morning. We put in 3 solid hours of offshore and dock shooting and with very good success. We caught in the neighborhood of 45-50 crappie and 2 catfish. About 20 of the crappie were keeper size and I intended to keep a limit to restock, but we miss counted and I had 16 in the livewell when I got home, so Lebron, I got one of your fish. Lolol

I think it was about 20 years ago that I began to take people out and show them how to catch crappies under the docks by shooting a jig way back under a dock where the water was good and dark. Richard Simms or Dr Mark Pollard might remember the year that I took them out and showed this technique. They were one of the early ones that I can remember. At one point in time, I had taken nearly 80 different men and women out and taught them the how to of dock shooting.

I said all of that to say this. I just about quit dock shooting because so many people were doing it that I needed to develop another technique to catch fish. A technique that very few do and that is fishing offshore with jigs. I started thinking yesterday that maybe I should go back to the lures and techniques that I used to do and see what happens. This is what happened today.

I found some old crystal Shad 1.5” Panfish Assassins that I had 1/32 oz jigs glued on and using my 4 lb test line (only line I use) and we proceeded to fish. We found a dock in 15-16 feet of water that no one had fished this morning and stayed with them well over an hour and a half until the fish biting slowed down. We knew that no one had fished the dock because of the spider webs that we broke through with our lines. I think that we caught well over 30-40 fish under this dock. Lots of shorts here but also the biggest keepers of the day as well.

Water flow was 13,600 cfs and surface temp was 81.7 when I first looked about 8 am. Virtually no wind but a very soft gentle North breeze got up before we quit fishing. Thanks for going with me Mr S.