Pay Attention to Local Knowledge!
One day, as I was leaving the parking lot after fishing on the Crappie Dock, I stopped to talk to the attendant at the pay booth/inspection station. I asked her if anybody got any good fish that she knew of.
She said, “You know, there was several Asian guys that I don’t know, that came out a few hours ago, and had some large crappie and they asked me if I wanted a few”. She said she thanked them and asked him where they caught them because she knew they were not fishing on the Crappie Dock.
Well, they told her that they were fishing from the bank, at a spot that was a pretty long walk down towards the dam.
I have fished the lake for over 35 years, and I’ve never fished that specific area for crappie from shore before — but I thought tomorrow I’m going to do some exploring!
So, I took off walking down the bank towards the dam like she described.
It was quite a long stretch that no bank fisherman ever seemed to fish.
The walking was pretty easy actually, there was no real trail, you had to step over fallen logs and walk around some thick brush at times, but it really wasn’t that bad walking.
As as I walked, I was paying close attention to the shoreline for any sign of human activity, when I came to a spot where I saw a lot of footprints, and a few filtered cigarette butts on the ground.
This spot didn’t didn’t look any different from the rest of the lake shoreline, except for the footprints and cigarette butts, but I thought this spot certainly was worth some casts. I quickly threw a curly tail Crappie jig under a bobber that was set at about 4 feet.
It was a windy flat, where the wind was gently blowing from the left to the right,
so I cast off way to my left, and after the wind blew the bobber only about 5 feet, the bobber disappeared — the first cast, a nice fat crappie. Well it’s no exaggeration to say that on virtually every “drift” in the wind, the bobber disappeared! These fish were not the 2 to 3 pound slabs, but they were not small either, all in the nice 10 to 12 inch size!
A friend of mine happened to be passing by in his boat and saw me sitting there by myself on this long stretch of shoreline.
He slowed down and yelled, “Is that you Deke? I yelled back Yes!,, and held up a dead branch with several large crappie strung through the gills.
He beached his boat, and we both sat there, catching these large bobber crappie, until we weren’t — they just suddenly stopped biting! So my friend took off in his boat, and I walked back to my car vowing to return tomorrow!
I returned the next day to the same spot, and the action was the same, but an entirely different situation, but that’s a story for an another time!
Pay attention to local knowledge —sometimes it pays off big!
