Spring Bobbers ?

[CTom]

On my rods with retro-fitted St. Croix springs I remove the jig at the end of the day and tie my line off at the spool. Then I turn the spring around, inserting the barrel from the rear so the spring isn't damaged. The spring stays right there if I am not using it and can be put to use quickly if I want it....out of the way other-wise and I can still cast with the spring riding as such.

[no1son]

CT,

We definitely fish different waters with a much different size structure, too. Most of the lakes I fish are natural, relatively small, very fertile and generally much shallower with more gradual breaks. We saw on 15.5" crappie this year taken by an adjacent party, and we took maybe a dozen and a half that beat 13, and that was all early spring, but the majority of our crappies run 7-10" with a 10" fish being even rarer in our waters than the 14s are for you.

What has me thinking about small forage is not really so much the crappies as the fact that larger gamefish that show up for the bonus in our crappie fishing take the small baits in a very similar way to the crappies often soft enough that the bite is close to undetectable, until you tighten the line and set the hook. This past spring and through the ice last winter we took more real trophy gamefish on the tiny baits than in all our previous fishing careers combined most of those on very soft takes. That is a big part of the reason I think an important part of how a fish takes a bait is what that bait is, especially how big or small.

These lakes are not deep or clear enough for trout, but have healthy and full size ranges of all the other Minnesota lake game fish and any one of them might show up next in our crappie fishing including some real monster carp all the way down to 3" little greedy green sunnies and 4" stocked walleyes. You can generally tell the sunfish bite from all the others, too, as a peck peck peck rather than a one time take, and the walleyes tend to hit a little harder. Where we fish there are almost always sunnies around.

Personally I do fish for the catch and everything goes back. On my ultralight I enjoy them all. The more the better. Working with a partner over the past nearly a decade we have gotten to the point that we generally find the crappies, if they are around at all. Or if not we will take what we find or move on. With so many fishable waters so close around us we may move as many as three or four times an outing. BTW he works weekdays and I work weekends; so most our trips are little more than a couple or three or four hours after work for one or the other of us and all our fishing is on foot year around.

We neither of us harvest for the table, not out of the Metro and we both fish very light tackle; so everything is fun. I am certainly in it for the catch.

dutch