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Camp Far West Lake 10/12/2015
A few important notes about this lake:
Small reservoir feeding the farmlands. Close to the city, so weekends are packed with ski boats. Hence, go on weekdays if you want to enjoy fishing. $20 car plus boat for one day. Currently, the drought has brought the lake 50% down but the deepest is still 50ft. Still able to launch boats and no docks. Water clarity is muddy, about 2ft of visibility. Lots of bait shad and infested with spotted bass. There are stocked strippers. I am never too fond of strippers in lakes as they eat a lot of the smaller crappies and plus crappies have not where to hide in this lake. I have side imaged 90% of the lake and there are absolutely no sunken or lay down trees. The lake also does not allow dropping brushes or pvc habitats.
My day at the lake on 10/13/2015: I arrived at the lake at noon with northwest winds @ 4mph. It was 85 degrees and was supposed to hit a hot 92. The thermocline expanded between 12-20ft deep. It was obvious that this hot fall weather would keep the crappies behaving like summer patterns so I side imaged, down imaged, and 2D imaged all flats right at the bottom of the thermocline and focused on nothing lower than 20ft. It is times like this that adjusting my sonar to focus on 20ft and above that really helps cone in the fish. I began trolling crappie crankbaits between 8-15 ft and kept catching spotted bass, so I switched over to a two pole spider rig set up with two jigs on each to get my baits at 20ft. As the temperature increased during the day, crappies would become lethargic and slowing way down did the trick. I began focusing on scattered small groups of fish on my 2D switchfire mode. One pass over the hump landed a 13” white crappie in the photo attached. The rest were picked up scattered on a flat. I found them scattered in small groups all suspended between 15-20 ft. We had to keep moving to get bites. Ended up catching at least two dozen’s but only brought home 11 crappies averaging 11” for the dinner table and called it a night.
To those that are getting into crappies, my day catching these crappies took multiple trial and errors, multiple loops around the flats and humps. If only you saw my boat trail on my digital gps map on the fishfinder, it looks like my 5 year old took a pen and went at it. I had my wife and impatient 5 year old with me complaining left and right. What I am saying is that it was hard work, but worth it when we finally found the crappies.
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