Thread: The mercury is rising and the crappie are biting

This story starts like most of my stories start, I got a text from vbottom on Wednesday night letting me know he had today off. It just so happened that I had nothing going either so we decided to hit the water early and try to catch some crappie before the heat got unbearable. I picked him up about 6am and we headed west down I-96 to Morrison Lake (Ionia County). We were on the water shortly after 6;30 and, with a 7 mph wind blowing the length of the lake, we decided to set up for some long line drifting. Our first drift put three pretty decent crappie in the box as well as several that got off at the boat. We motored back to the "narrows" and started another drift. Again, we were rewarded with several more 9 1/2- 10 1/2 inch cookie cutters. Thus went our day. Some drifts put 3-4 in the live well, some 6-8. Every drift produced at least one. On one of our better drifts, I had a crappie on both of my rods and turned to hand one off to Jeff only to see him with fish on both of his rods, too. We ended up landing two of the four. About 2:00 we put #50 in the box and headed back to the launch, happy to be getting out of the sun. The temp was 95 when we pulled away from the ramp.

The water temp was in the mid 80's and all of the fish were caught on 1/16 jigs and Sliders, white/chartreuse and electric chicken and beetle spins in similar colors. Slab Sauce original formula seemed to make a difference today. The most productive depth was 16 fow with our jigs running 8-10 feet down.