Fishing February 3 2008

With the warming temps and the rains that we have been receiving our ice is starting to take a toll and making things a little interesting. We decided to head to a pond that is known for having large crappies and this was going to be our focus for this trip. Upon arriving at the waters edge there is something going on as this shoreline that we get to first almost always has open water on the edges and is open once again. Have to walk around a part of the lake to get to a place that the ice is safe enough to set foot on.

Since this pond has some big crappies in the 13” and bigger class we decided to stay out in deeper water and search for suspending fish. After drilling a few holes we started catching a number of nicer sunfish on T.H.E. Jig and they were coming in fairly regularly. We had to down size to the smallest jig as the fish on the Vexilar would hover around T.H.E. Jig but at times showed no interest what so ever. Since the crappies weren’t coming in we forged on and drilled more holes in our search.

At this point we switched over to the Loby Baits micro flea in the pink color and the crappies started gobbling this bait up. We were catching more crappies than sunfish and that is what our quest was for this day but the size wasn’t what we were looking for and catching 10-11.5” fish fairly regularly. We decided to move out into deeper water and this is when we started connecting with bigger crappies. These fish were in 20 fow and were suspending anywhere from 17 feet up to 14 feet. These fish that were suspending were more aggressive than the ones that were lower towards the bottom. We were able to catch a bass as well and this fish came in and slammed the micro flea and gave the Austin rod another workout which it handled the fight very well.

All in all it was a good day out on this pond but we never did find those 13 inch plus fish that we were looking for. With the weather being warm and a light breeze all day the ice is getting worn and the top layer is definitely softening up here and we need to get some cold nights once again and freeze things over nicely. From the times that we have been to this pond we usually don’t catch numbers of fish but on this outing we caught a number of fish and the crappies were good fighters. We will be back again soon as the search for those slab crappies will continue.

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