A pleasant evening trip, 8-19

Today's weather was very nice for mid-August; upper 70's, low humidity, partly cloudy with a variable breeze. So nice in fact that I felt obligated to finish it off with a fishing trip. I headed up to the "new pond" again to see what I could find. What I found was a pretty stiff breeze directly out of the north, right down the lake making my trip a bit more difficult than I'd hoped. Launched just after 5, with water temp at 76. I rowed up the lake against the wind without trolling until I got near the area I wanted to both fish and map. I clipped on a Southern Pro bleeding shad minnow tube, a SP crappie shad in black and silver and the silver/black/chartreuse Slabilicious I used the other day. Only took a few minutes to land the first crappie, had 3 in the boat in the first 8-10 minutes, all about 8-9" and very skinny. I kept moving along and soon hooked a double, this nice 12" crappie and the LMB, perhaps an inch longer, maybe 1 1/2 lbs. or so.

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I pretty much kept these baits on all night as they were on heavier jig heads and I was mainly fishing the deeper waters of the basin, out away from the edges. I had lots of takers there, all crappie. Here are a couple more nice ones.

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Walt and Rich, you'll be pleased to know that I FINALLY had some good action drifting with the wind over the basin! Had a spell where the wind picked up pretty good for a while and since I was pretty far up the lake, decided to let it push me back down and did pretty well for once with your favorite technique. Picked up 6-7 fish over that drift, probably 20-25 minutes worth of it, all crappie.
Oddly, it wasn't until the sun got buried behind the clouds and the hill that the bluegill decided to turn on; hadn't hooked one all evening then suddenly, every fish was a bluegill. I don't think I hooked another crappie once that happened but hey, they are all fun to catch.
Totals tonight would be about 15-16 crappie, the one bass, and probably half a dozen bluegill.

I had to stop on the way home and snap a picture of the sunset over the hill, too.
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Awesome report! You did GOOD! The quality of the crappie you are getting is much better than what we're seeing. Congrats!

Outstanding report and great Crappie. Keep up the good times. Glad to see you tried our way of drifting deeper water and hope you continue trying it.

Good job and beautiful pictures as usual. Thanks for sharing.

Nice job. Those are some good looking fish.