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Hot bite last night, 7-18
Hot as in more than just the air temperature! 870 and I fished a new patch of water for the both of us. We launched about 5:20 with heavy, humid air and a bit of a breeze, which actually felt darn nice to us both after a long working day outside. I'm guessing the air temp was in the mid 80's still, and the water out away from shore was near 80 as well. We didn't have a good map of this water and where his Garmin claimed we should have been in about 12' of water, we had about 1/2 of that. We didn't rely on the map but fished what was under and around us.
We were in to fish right away; yellow perch and bluegill/pumpkinseed's would be plentiful, along with the LMB.
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Some of the sunnies were pigs, 9+" and heavy bodied, fighting like the dickens on our light tackle. Perch came from 4-5" up to nearly 12"; quite a number of those came home with us. The bass ran from about 6" up to maybe 14" or so.
We had one very interesting non-crappie bite; just a few minutes earlier I had remarked to 870 that we hadn't caught a single pickerel. We'd been working over quite a lot of weeds so it was indeed unusual not to have hooked one.
I was bringing in a fish when I heard my partner say quietly, "I don't know what this is but I think I'll need a net". I looked over just in time to see what may have been the biggest pickerel head I'd ever seen in person break the surface, give a tremendous head shake and spit the hook. We just looked at each other in disbelief of what just happened. It may have been a Northern pike, it was that big but I don't know if this water has pike. It was a monster for sure!
And the crappie; it took us a while to really get in a groove with them but when we did it was hammer time!
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As the magic hour approached, nearly every cast resulted in a bend in the rod and a brief tussle. Many, many double catches. We were smiling like idiots as we wondered if it would slow down enough for us to say, "enough"!
But all good things must come to an end.
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While neither of us said it out loud, we knew it was getting to be quitting time. I'd just tossed out my line to a mark I could see on his sonar when 870 said, "oh, yea..net please". I could see the bend in his pole and up came the final fish of the night, biggest crappie of the day at a bit over 13 1/4", but heavy and full of fight. I bungled the net scoop but we managed to get him on the 2nd swipe and our night was over, a good fish to call it a day with.
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He had gotten my line as well and we both had to cut off to get untangled.
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All of our lucky winners went home with my partner and I'm sure he was up quite late turning them in to future dinners. There is probably a dozen perch in there, along with probably 2 dozen or so crappie. I feel quite confident in saying that neither one us has every caught as many crappie as we did last night. As for totals, we both agree it was probably a triple digit day between the 2 of us, another memorable trip for the mental scrapbook.
