I made it out last night for the first time in open water for the season. I was finding temps in the 62-64 deg range on the lake I was fishing, I thought that was high for the weather we had been having up to the last couple of days. Has anybody found temps that high yet or is there something messed up with my depth finder?
Surface temps can be deceiving. What is the water temp at the depth where you are catching the fish? I saw 63 in one spot yesterday too, but the wasn’t a fish at the top couple feet where that temp was found. At about 6 feet where the fishing was best the temp was way cooler….over 15 degrees cooler.
I use a submersible thermometer used by trout anglers who monitor water temps closely. To the line loop I have a ten foot length of surveyor’s cord tied on and have foot marks done with magic marker.
The crappies I caught were defintiely just in the early pre-spawn stages. They were not in the area I fished last week and deeper water was definitely a requisite to getting hit. The male fish had no color shift whatever yet and the spawn in females was still immature.
Maybe I was fishing to shallow then, I was in 5ft of water casting to shore. I did see some crappies caught though I only managed a couple of sunfish, I am assuming they were males as they were rather slim.
The cooler water right now offers the crappies the “comfort ” they like. It stable water. Changes deeper down are much more gradual. Yet the crappies like the warmer water too. The key is to find that pivot point. If you are a morning angler as I am, the crappies will be found down in the more stable water even though it is cooler water. As the day wears on, the crappies will slip up into the warmer water to feed but will drop back into the stable water as the night hours begin to show single digits. By dawn they are back at the deeper edges.
This won’t last long as the sun puts a lot of energy into the water right now and when those warmer temps inch their way into the water column to about five feet we’ll be seeing the spawn take place.
Crappies are willing to hold spawn if the water beyond the edges where most spawning happensdoesn’t get sufficiently warm. If the water is consistently warm to about 66 degrees down to 4-5 feet, spawning will happen. Be mindful that the really large crappies might spawn in much deeper water than the average crappie and they might do so even if the water temps are shy of the magic 66 degrees by as much as 6 degrees. And on any given body of water spawning crappies can be found in several different areas over a period of time that might be up to a week or ten days. Crappies spawning on the soiuth shore of a four hundred acre lake does not mean that the north shore will have crappies spawning at the same time. It happens, yes, but it doesn’t mean it is the rule.
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