What are your best baits and strategies month by month? Went out with a guide this summer and he had us using 3” Gulp! minnows and we did great-3” was an eye opener. Sounded like Tom does the same thing but goes smaller in the fall. What about winter and spring?Who fishes those buggars 12 months a year?
Better during the winter even though there are no winter pics on my phone. Didn’t really find them in a big way this fall, but spring and into the summer its always fun!!! Very rarely any bait, lots of Kalins crappie scrubbs, found another strike king plastic that the big ones really liked during the dragonfly hatch!!!
Winter time equals tungsten with plastics and little cecils!!! Love winter crappies for their ability to chase, unlike any other fish on a flasher!!!
Mark
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I overloaded the pictures, so I’ll throw a few more less at a time… the one above is summer flowage fish on the channels edges…
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Above were fall flowage fish in similar locales
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14 incher and some early fall fish that didn’t want to eat. More later…
P.S. I think the biggest out of this batch was 13, I took about a dozen pictures of fish tween 10.5 and 13, all under a bobber jig and an acid rain crappie scrubbs…
Mark
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Time after time plastics outproduced livebait this year. Gulp and small ripple shads.
Late fall (coldwater) gets turned to livebait.
I cannot remember the last time I used live bait has be over 20 years ago, crankbaits, jigs with plastics the main stay. Once in a while have crushed them with Swedish Pimples jigged vertically, Started doing more trolling the last couple of years with larger crankbaits number 5 Shadraps and larger. Biggest Crappie I ever caught came on a ring worm and 1/16 jig totally inhaled it, since then I have gone bigger bait size wise.
Almost always using Gulp during the open water season and if I’m using a lure instead of plastics I’m dipping it in the Gulp juice.
During the Winter I’m using smaller tungsten jigs with Clam Maki plastics. Have had the best luck with the Clam plastics over others especially the minnow head and Maki molds. Excited to try the scudi mold this year and it resembles a freshwater shrimp. Also love to use the smallest sized jigging rap for crappies tipped with waxies on the belly hook.
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