Good advice
Thanks for the awesome tips, everyone. I have a good arsenal of tactics I can try now, due to the good response I've had to this post. I've learned a lot in these forums, and hopefully some others are finding it useful as well.
I intend to be hunting for those redears starting in a couple weeks-- I'm having too much fun with the crappie and walleye to stop just yet. The muskie bite is coming on strong, too, but I will juggle in the redears as soon as it warms a little.
We had a major ice storm around here (Southern MO) and it loaded several of our area lakes with laydowns and big limbs; combine that with a full year of high water (with no end in sight), and you have an immense amount of cover where before there was little. It has made for tough fishing for most anglers I talk to locally, but some are adjusting to the new conditions and doing well.
Concerning the elusive (so far for me) redears, late last summer (late Aug- early Sept) I ran into a pack of redears that were hanging out on one partially-flooded buttonwillow bush that was at the end of a long row of the same kind of bushes, plus some downed timber. The water around the bush was about 3-4 feet deep, next to a quick taper to about 8-10 feet. I caught the fish on small (1-1/2 in. orange, yellow, and black twirly-tail grubs with 1/32 and 1/16 jig heads. I tried tipping with worms and it didn't seem to matter. Worms alone under a float produced nada. I had to stay back from the bush 10 feet or more and cast the lure right next to or into the bush. The fish would hit on the fall, sometimes right at the splashdown, sometimes when I would be reeling the lure in at a medium-fast retrieve. One of the biggest redear I caught was when I was drifting the same lure in about 10-12 feet paralleling the shoreline in that same area. I could see on my graph that there were some larger fish hanging out at that depth. I would bet those were the bigger fish of the school, but maybe they were crappie. Crappie were definitely in the vicinity offshore, and bluegills were using the area as well, suspending over deep water hitting near the surface, which was how I stumbled upon the readear. Maybe I'll get an underwater TV thing this year and be able to verify those kind of hunches about blips on the graph. The bite lasted for about a week and that was that. The biggest redear I had measured about 10 inches, and from what I've heard, that is only average for these sunfish.
Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.
Thoreau