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Persistence (and Slab Sauce) pays off.
I had a though decision to make this morning, should I drive an hour through Lansing rush hour traffic to get to Stockbridge so I could dig 10 post holes for a deck I'm building or should I hook to the boat and try to catch some crappie. I decided on the latter. When my helper showed up at 7:00 I broke the news to him, and he was all in with the idea.
We headed over to Morrison Lakes, getting on the water by about 8:00. The wind was light out of the east so we set up to drift the same area me and Jeff fished last week. First pass produced one for my nephew, Tyler, and a big zip for me. We motored back to our start point and the second pass put two more in the box. Then they shut down. There were probably 15 boats on the lake and nobody was catching fish. We trolled around the entire east basin without a hit and after two hours seemed destined to end the day with just the three. Feeling a bit frustrated, I love to fish but don't like not catching fish, I pulled the trolling motor and told Tyler we were going to search until we found fish. I could have got on gills or perch but was determined to have Tyler catch a mess of crappie. I had to prove to Steve that I'm not just a bluegill slayer, too. :biggrin
After a bit of searching we marked some huge schools of fish, I'm thinking they were balls of bait fish with crappie all around them. Once we figured out where the fish were, we dropped the troller and long lined Sliders, Roadrunners and beetle spins. The bite wasn't fast and furious but we were putting fish in the box. About 12:30 it was like someone flipped a switch. The bite was so fast that a lot of times we had no baits in the water. They were hitting bright colors, white/ chartreuse, yellow/orange and salt/pepper. I tried to keep up with the clicker (fish counter) but in the heat of battle, I forgot a few times. When we decided to take a count, we were at 38. One more pass put us at 42 and one more down and back put us at a two man limit of 50. Slab Sauce made a big difference today with G Sauce having a slight edge over E Sauce (Ed sauce).
We snapped a couple of pictures when we were done for the day and when I asked Tyler if he'd ever caught that many crappie, he told me this was by far the most he'd ever caught. I even came up with a new term, Tylering a crappie. That's when you bring it all the way to the boat and have it come off when you're swnging it into the boat. That kid must have lost 30 fish today. Of course I was sympathetic.
There was one other boat that stuck around long enough to experience the feeding frenzy, a couple of older gentlemen, and when we were leaving, we pulled up to them and gave them a bottle of slab sauce. They were happy to get it and also surprised to find out we had limited out without minnows. I showed them the jig/plastic we were using and they both had a "well I'll be" look on their faces.
That's my story, hope you enjoyed it.
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Not sure how one picture got up side down :dono
