Thread: Salt Fork - 6/16

Sorry , never been there, I'd love 2 check it out some time......post a report on how u do....good luck & God bless

The size limit kept our cooler pretty empty on Saturday. We caught several crappie between 8-8 3/4"...just under the 9" required mark. We also caught a couple blue gills, and one white bass. I'd say we fished for around 4 hours or so and caught around 20 fish with only one being big enough to keep, so we had a big catch and release kind of day. It still made for a good day, though, because we did catch several fish (just not enough keepers.) We were mostly trolling and vertical jigging around structure in anywhere from 8-12 FOW using minnows. The bite was definitely pretty weak for all of the crappie. If you weren't paying attention you'd lose a minnow and not even know it. Overall, still a nice relaxing day on the boat.

Next time you get out try switching between jigs and minnows. Sometimes the prefer the one bait over the other. I was out this past weekend and the bite was tough until I switched to jigs...then it was game on.

We're headed to Salt Fork again next week. Hopefully we'll do a little better this time; but we usually start having a harder time as the water heats up late in the summer. I bought some Marabou jigs and Squirmin squirts tubes to use this time around so we can alternate between the jigs, tubes, and minnows depending on what's hitting.

I fished 2 different lakes this past weekend.
Lake #1, all the fish were caught on jigs. Mostly tubes but we did use some stingers also.
Lake #2, 90% on minnows. Very few hits on jigs.

Try them all......

We camped at the state park from 8/7-8/12. Only got out for two days for a few hours each; but ended up with 6 keepers between 9-12". A couple of those were really nice fish. Also caught a few sunfish, white bass, and smaller crappie that went back into the water. We were using tubes and marabou jigs. All of the catches were pretty spread out, never really got into any kind of schooling. Also, the bite pretty much quit after 10:30. Saturday morning the fish coming out of the water were warmer than the air temp. Held on to them for an extra couple seconds to warm up your hands before putting them in the cooler, haha. If we could've gotten out every morning when we were there and fished with the same results, there would've been a decent mess of fish at the end of the week. Between the weather and sharing the boat with my nephews for tubing and skiing we could only get out got the two mornings.

Sorry for the last sentence...should just be "we could only get out the two mornings"

It's not really known as a great crappie lake (relative to other OH lakes) although I do fish it most often for crappie and cats. I love Salt Fork and you'll have no problem castching bucket fulls of crappie that are <9". However, there some nice fish in there... I guy I speak with on the OHIO game fish board took out two 16"+ fish this year on minnows under floats in one of the less fished ski zones. Even if they were 14" inches apiece that's not bad either. Anyway, what I'm saying has been stated by others on this board as well. Not a reason not to avoid crappie fishing there, you can have a great day. Are you going to walk away with 10 keepers consistently? Probably not but if you do...tell us.