Tough Drifting Today!

[Crestliner08]

We have postponed two previous days of crappie fishing due to the threat of severe thunderstorms and rain. Same forecast for today, but the primordial urges to wet a line surpassed our better judgement and we went anyway. On the water by 7:30 am and off by 2 pm. Turned out that the weather folks were wrong again! We encountered no rain or storms. Very warm day with temps in mid-80's. Breezes were way too light for "speed drifting" which is what we wanted to do. Here's what the day looked like:



Started off with light zephyrs and by 9 am we were becalmed totally! We tried casting but got nothing but bluegill and dink crappie along the shorelines and drops. We went back to searching the main lake basin and found several schools of bait and fish:



The breeze started up again around 10:30 and we started getting into more consistent action. We caught & released about 40 - 50 crappie; most were small, but a few were decent. We also caught a LOT of bluegill today. Sometimes 3 gills to each crappie while drifting. Very unusual for this area. Nice sizes to the gills, but crappie were the target species, so we were a bit disappointed. Here's a sampling of the better crappie we caught, starting off with mine:





And a couple of my partner Walt's fish:





All in all not a bad day, but the time we lost during the calm period was not what we wanted. Going to try again when the weather forecast predicts more of a breezy day. Hopefully we can get another day with 10 - 20 mph wind. I feel very confident we can do much better under those conditions. Best producers today were straight tails and tubes. Jig weights were all 1/16 oz.. I did try a couple of Roadrunners in 1/16 oz. size. Got several hits but no real takes.