Fishing February 17, 2008

Always seem to pick the wrong day weather wise to go out fishing but when other things need to be done there is nothing that can be helped. We ventured back to the lake that we have been frequenting the past couple of weeks in search of the elusive bigger crappies that live in those waters.

Since it has been a little warmer and raining some as well, the ice conditions were not bad other than being very slippery on the surface. Of course there was another storm front approaching with rain for the evening. What we had to deal with was high winds up to 30 mph that didn’t allow us to setup any type of wind break so we had to sit in the wind. Thankfully the temps were somewhat mild and were bearable but made it tough to watch the line for those light biters.

We concentrated mostly in 20 FOW and found the crappies were suspending up to 5 feet off of the bottom. Apparently with the approaching storm, this has triggered the fish into biting and bigger fish than we normally catch. After catching a few fish we were right into the 13 inch crappies and were able to catch a number of these before the bite died off. There wasn’t any sunfish caught at all and usually there is always a mixture between the two species.

The bait that we were using was the Loby Baits Micro Flei in the pink color and we have been using this particular piece of plastic for the last couple of outings. This goes to show the durability that these baits are made from and why plastics are fantastic. This was the only bait that was used as they were keying very nicely onto it.

As the winds persisted the bite started to dramatically drop off and after drilling more than 20 holes they were reluctant to bite very aggressively. This particular lake the shoreline was finally frozen solid once again but with the coming warm temps and rain, this may hamper our opportunities of fishing here again. This lake turns the big fish on when late ice starts and now is the time to get out there and find these bigger fish.

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