Crappie trip with a Jay W.

Jay and I got on the water about a quarter to 8 am with hopes of bass fishing with top water lures, but a strong South wind quickly nixed that idea and our backup plan was to crappie fish. We caught a ton of crappie this morning, probably 50 but only 12 keepers in the bunch and many of those were 10” and less than 11”.

The first stop was after scanning a dock and seeing a huge school of crappie under it. We set the spot lock on and started caching crappie on every casts and most on a 2-4 second drop. After they wised up and dropped down, we continued to catch them for about an hour or so.

When the fish finally had all the fun that they wanted, they left the area. Scanning more docks in the area proved to be fruitless, so I opted for an offshore brush pile in 14 feet of water and it was covered with short crappie as well. We had a ball catching them on nearly every cast until they grew tired of being jerked around.

Bobby Garland Slab slayers in several colors caught fish. The baby Shads only produced one fish for me so I switched back to SS.

Surface temp to begin was just under 75 degrees at 74 and like I said, the wind was out of the south getting up to double digits by noon.

After we quit crappie fishing, we decided to scout for just a few minutes in the creek and I saw some big signatures on the graph between 15-25 feet, so I threw a spoon on one of my bass rods, let the spoon go to the bottom and then with a quick jerk up and start reeling, a nice 4 pound 5 ounce Striper nailed the spoon and it was game on. I love it. That baby is going on the grill tonight. Blackened Striper on the grill is one of the best fish dinners that you can imagine.