2.19.06 crappie fishing

I got out to fish yesterday (sunday) for crappies. It was a pretty fun time and we got into some nice crappies early. We got on the ice at about 8 AM and i fished until around 4 PM. The bite was pretty good from right when we got there to about 10:30. After that, we couldn’t get bit. I should have left, but i kept counting on the fact that it would pick up by 2 oe 3 like usual. well it didn’t. I was pretty much bored out of my mind so i started drilling holes everywhere. I fished deep (where we usually get them) in about 30 fow. That came up short, so i went extremely deep and found a place with 43 feet of water under neath me! This is pretty dang deep for panfishing. I bottomed out the 40 ft scale on my Lx-3 and had to use the 80 foot range! This spot gave up 3 keeper crappies and 1 really small one, to my delight. Other than that short lived experience, it was darn slow after the morning bite shut off. I probably caught 20-25 fish all day, with more than 3/4 of them being caught in the AM. I did catch one 15 inch largemouth on my panfish popper ultralight. I tell you that was a blast with 2 pound ice line and in 12 feet of water at the time. I ended up keeping a nice little bunch of fish, and my friend took probably 10 for himself as well. The day would have felt much more successful if we would have left at noon…We got some good fish to show for it, but if you look at how much time we spent(8 hours ) on the ice, it really wasn’t good fishing at all. Oh well, thats the way it goes. Hopefully next weekend will be better.

these pics were some lame attempts to show the 2 biggest crappies that i took home. My friend Carson took home a few that were just as big too. These were probably around 11 inches. I am yet to catch a true slab out of this honey hole, but it will come. So far i have only managed to break 12″ a few times. I am telling you it will come.

please ignore the fact that i put 12/19/06 for the date. I edited but i guess it will show up wrong on “today’s threads”….Brain fart.
Heres the mess that i took home. Fun cleaning last night while watching my favorite TV shows

Nice fish Cade
Let this cold snap settle and the bite will last longer

Nice report Cade. I see in the background you are ready for the open water season when it comes [boat]. Nice fish.
Thanks, Bill

Great pics and report Cade! How is that lx-3 treating you?

Nice mess of fish. Why do they always say “mess” of fish? Must be the mess we make on that LX Tribune. 8 hours should be nothing to a young fellow like you Cade. Didn’t make it out this weekend but fished from 230 to 5 this afternoon. While the fish hit all the jigs I tried none were hot. I came home with five 10 and 11 inchers, threw the rest back to grow up. Used pieces of a minnow, mousies and waxies.

Nice slabbers Cade! Those fish sure look healthy. Your having a pretty good ice fishing season. Most ice fisherman would like to be able get a mess of fish like that as often as you do. I haven’t caught one over 12″ yet this year either. I am thinking late ice will produce some nice fish.

‘Twas a very tough weekend of ice fishing. I fished two areas this weekend. The first was on friday and we fished the same spot as last weekend. It was pretty tough, i iced a few keepable fish but put all back, because as you can see from my previous posts, my freezer is pretty full well on saturday i probably caught 15 fish total from about 1:30-5:30. It was slow slow slow.
today…ugh i don’t really want to talk about it. I think i may have caught 8-10 fish with one borderline gill. It was really horrible. I felt bad for my dad. He caught 1 fish all weekend i loaned him my lx-3 a few times, but he couldn’t get bit. I keep telling him to get a spring bobber and a nice combo, but he likes the cheepy ones for a couple bucks i guess. I know what to get him for next christmas