spent sunday pm fishing on clear and am suprised at the size of the crappies we caught,iced alot of heavy 10-11″ fish and not many were much smaller.they hit on crappie minnows in the deeper water.hook color did not seem to matter but dead sticking was the way to go,any jigging and they disapeared off the marcum.12″ of ice and alot of houses and traffic on the lake.all of ours went back in the lake for another day.
It’s nice to hear that some people release those panfish. Its fun catching those crappies on live bait,especially when you have kids-they love watchin that float go down! Nice report rgo,thank you. 
rgo, what landing do you usely go off of? i was thinking of taking my kids out there. just looking for a safe route. oh yeah, and if we can find some ten inch crappies maybe they wont be to disappointed after they got spoiled when i took them to url 2 weekends ago 
scratch that, just came across another trip to url again 
for this weekend
I quit fishing on Clear as it was too crowded on the ice for me, but I wouldn’t feel bad if you were keeping crappies from Clear Lake. Actually I would encourage it….when the big die off of crappies occurred in the past the remaining crappies seemed to get bigger. Less competition for food….more food per fish. I think it can be better than it is for size/weight ratio for those crappies and the bluegills have been decent in the past 3 years. There are so many panfish in that lake I would think some are starving….which in the past a 10 inch crappie was so thin you’d look at it and think it was a 10 inch potato chip it was so thin. Just my opinion though…TGIF
What Clear lake are we talking about? 
the one in waseca grump.tgif: I agree about the 10″ potato chips as last year we caught alot of those while targeting blue gills during late ice.I was more or less playing with my new marcum last weekend and at the same time keeping my fishaholic 12 year old son entertained.we decided not to clean fish if we caught some that day as it would make our day that much shorter on the ice.a little C&R is good for a kid to learn if he wants to come back some day with his own kids.
Clear lake is officially the busiest lake I have ever seen! I thought i would get out on a weekday and have the lake to myself, boy was I in for a suprise. Every time I would setup my portable, someone would come and setup right next to me. And I tried to set up away from all the permanents,but there must be at least 500 houses out there so it was no easy task… Fishing, by the way, was pretty good if you can escape the cars, trucks, suvs, four wheelers, snowmobiles ect… Their was even a guy that drove within two feet of me while I was setting up, I could have reached out and touched his car. All in all the fishing was not worth the frustration, next time I will pick a different lake. Good luck
We headed up to Clear Lake this weekend on Sunday to try our luck on some crappies. We started fishing at about 6:45am or so. It was nice and quiet out there but there were no fish moving. We were on the north side of the lake. At about 8 in the am or so, the crowds of people started driving out on the lake and drilling holes. The 5″ perch were the only thing that would bite. We decided to move to the south side of the lake and had a lot better luck. We went where there wasn’t anyone and drilled 10 holes and trolled outside for the remainder of the morning. Man it was nice to be outside for more than 5 minutes without freezing your 
off.The sunnies were hitting pretty well but your presentation had to be small. I was using a horizontal type jig tipped with some plastics from custom jigs and spins. Waxies or minnows would not work. ended the day at noon havng caught and released 20 or so decent sunnies. No Crappies for me, and truthfully I did not see a suspended fish all day.
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