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Hey it was great to meet you yesterday. Sorry I wasn't so talkitive , but I have a extremely competitive mind set when tourney fishing. I wish there would have been some bigger fish on that brushpile. Anyway I have to go unpack the durango. holler at yall later
Well I completely understand the competative nature during a money tournament. The biggest fish we caught there were only 0.4lbs on my digital scales and they measured 10" long with a Deliar ruler. Not that big by any standard. We did catch about 25 on Saturday but most were only about 8 or 9 inchs long. Larry (the guy driving our boat) said that he caught a few this summer that went much larger. He was catching them on the main lake. We moved across the lake from that brush pile spot and caught a few more smaller crappie. We had about 3 of the 10" crappie while the rest were around 8 or 9" long. But most were pretty fat. I need to check my digital scales to make sure that it's reading accurately as it seemed to be reading light. Larry swore that those crappie were bigger than 4 tenths of a pound. LOL
It was great to meet you and your son. He seems like a fine young man and someday will be a competative (IN THE MONE) crappie fisherman if you keep helping him.
I went again today but got a late start. I didn't reach the lake until around 2:30PM Sunday. The damn bait store (Hook Line and Sinker) was closed on Sunday and I had to drive to back to Eckerty to get minnows. Since I was already back on hwy 64 I headed East and went the Little Patoka River Boat ramp for the very first time. I can't believe that I have fished Patoka since it opened but never launched at that boat ramp before. I didn't have a lot of time to study the maps. I did manage to catch 6 crappie Sunday but most were too small to keep. I only put two in the live well but I decided to return them to the lake when I left. I did see a 4lb Black Bass LM that was weighted in at the boat ramp parking lot. I saw that fish and another that was about 2lbs. The 4lb bass was very stocky and not thin at all. It was a fat sob. hehe. It was thick. They returned the 2lb fish to the lake and kept the 4lb bass as it's gills were damaged and they didn't think it would make it. Someone caught a nice slab 15" long White Crappie on a crank bait while bass fishing and gave it to a couple that were crappie fishing. The couple didn't do very well. I talked with some guys in a boat across where I was fishing at 4pm and they said that they caught a few crappie. I didn't realize it but they were fishing a ditch or intermittant steam. I got lost trying to follow the old river channel in the little patoka Lake section (branch with the rock Quarry) Western most branch at the south end of little patoka river section of the lake. I found some crappie at the intersection of the allen creek and little patoka river and found a bridge and a roadway there. I caught some crappie there. I had to drive 72 miles home from that boat ramp. Lots of people from Louisville, KY and New Albany and Georgetown IN fish out of that boat ramp. It's closer to them than it is to me as I came up from Evansville. I started out fishing lick fork when the lake first opened and have been working my way around the lake ever since. LOL I finally have fished all sections of Patoka Lake. It's not that easy with my small boat. Now Larry's boat can get up to 55 mph or so and he can cover more water faster than I can. But he likes to travel at around 25mph and save gasoline. Gasoline was selling for $1.98 a gallon for Regular and that is outrageous. I only paid $1.84 at home.
I hope they post the results soon on the crappeusa web site. I didn't get a chance to socialize at the weigh in either as Larry was anxious to get back home. He has his little dog with him and didn't have a leash and got tired of holding him. We had to get back and clean those crappie anyway.
I looked at the map when I got home last night and found out that the area you and we fished was actually a ditch that ran though that area all the way back out to the main river channel. The river channel makes a very shape bend that where that ditch connects to the outside bend of the river channel. I figure that the crappie followed that ditch to the area where we fished. All our fish were caught above 19ft level.
Larry was going out with his other half (his wife) Sunday and so we didn't get to fish together Sunday.
Hey Next year they are having the Crappie USA CLASSIC at Patoka Lake. So be ready for next year. LOL
Quote:
Originally Posted by Patrick Vowell
Well I hope to be ready. I still need to qualify. Alot of the slabs that were taken saturday came out of 2 to 6 foot of water.
Well I was still using old data in my mind last Saturday. I was going on information from the Sept 15 Corp of enginner temp and dissolved oxygen survey. The corp had performed a updated temp/do study on Oct 4th and I failed to find that on the web and study it. My fault. I was going on old data.
The new study showed the dissolved oxygen content of the lake had dropped quite a bit thoughout the upper layers and the thermocline was depressed down to 26ft. It was at 18 19ft on Sept 15th but was at 26ft on Oct 4th. The water had cooled quite a bit. I got measurements in the mid 60's on Saturday using Larry's Lowrence XL75 depth finder and I measure the surface temp on Monday at 20.2 Deg C. on my YSI meter and got a surface reading of 19.3 on my Hummingbird temperature probe. The humminbird probe is glued onto my humminbirds transducer which is mounted on the transom of my boat. I mounted the transducer where the bottom of it sits just about 1/4 " below the bottom of my boat. That way it's in the more laminar water flow. It's designed to kick up if it hits something underwater while I am underway. So any temp reading taken with the Minn-Kota Temp Gauges would be about 1ft below the surface. But with my 25ft long YSI cable I measured the water temp from the surface down to 25ft in one foot increments and it never really changed much. Maybe 0.2 of a deg C if that much. The meter is hard to read but I swear that the needle didn't move. I even thought that my first attemp to take the temp profile may have been in error. I thought that maybe the probe got hung up in the top of a submerged tree top or something and didn't really go down into the water column. So I repeated the measuremnts in another part of the lake right out in the middle of the river channel. I got the same results. Then I put the probe in my cooler which was full of ice water. The temp gauge dropped down to zero deg C in the icy water. So that told me the meter was working ok. I didn't have any boiling water but I bet that If I had I could have stuck the probe into the boiling water and it would have read 100 deg C right on the money. So the readings were accurate down to 25ft. My only problem was that I needed the 50ft long cable since the thermocline was reported to be at 26ft. LOL Just my luck that the Patoka Lake thermolcine on Oct 4th and I guess on Oct 11 Monday was at 26ft or deeper. Who knows where the thermocline was at on Oct 11th when I did my study. My Dissolved Oygen/Temp Probe has a bad thermister inside it and that prevents it from actually taking any DO measurements. I can't get the meter take any DO measurements anymore. The plastic casing had a crack that let water get inside the probe and it must have shorted out the thermister inside. However the temp reading part of the probe still works. I patched the crack with glue after drying out the inside of the probe. I need to buy a new probe someday to get it working up to 100% capacity. I miss not have the Dissolved Oxygen Readings. Here is why. On Oct 4th the dissolved oxygen at 5ft down was lower than was on Sept 15. When the lake turns over the low oxygen content water below the thermocline mixes with the surface waters and dilute the amount of oxygen in the lake. The only way to get oxygen back into the water is at the surface/air interface. Therefore there will be more oxygen being dissoved back into the upper layers of the lake a few days following the lakes turnover. At time progresses more and more oxygen is transfered from the air into the water by wind and wave action and by osmosis. That could be why the big crappie were holding in the upper layers of the water.
Here is a copy of the COE Oct 4th report
WATER QUALITY DATA FOR PATOKA LAKE (PRR)
(10/4/2004)
Time: 1000 Pool Elevation: 535.43 Thermometer Air Temperature: 71.6 F° (22.0 C°) Tailwater Temperature: 69.3 F° (20.7 C°) Tailwater Dissolved Oxygen: 7.7mg/L
Depth Temp Oxygen 0 69.6F° (20.9C°) 5.1 5 69.3F° (20.7C°) 5.1 10 69.3F° (20.7C°) 4.6 15 69.1F° (20.6C°) 4.0 20 69.1F° (20.6C°) 4.5 25 68.5F° (20.3C°) 3.7 26 67.6F° (19.8C°) 2.2 27 67.3F° (19.6C°) 0.4 28 66.9F° (19.4C°) 0.3 29 63.7F° (17.6C°) 0.6 30 61.9F° (16.6C°) 0.2 35 60.6F° (15.9C°) 0.0 40 57.6F° (14.2C°) 0.0
***Data collection for this lake has stopped for the current year, it will resume collecting data in May 2004***
Click here to see Raw Data For This Lake/Reservoir http://www.lrl.usace.army.mil/wc/wq/prr.jpg
Quote:
Originally Posted by Patrick Vowell