While some shreds of ice still remain for the not-so-smarts, the open water on Lake Zumbro has continued with a fair crappie bite. In the last week some pretty decent fish have hit the ruler with some well into the 12- 12 1/2 inch range. All have been black crappies, but today gave up a very nice sunfish of about 9 1/2 inches. What has been absolutely outlandish is the bass bite.
Both smallies and largemouths have been picking on the crappie jigs with continued regularity. Most of the smallies are coming in at around the 16 inch mark, some larger [19″ on one]and some a bit shorter. None under 14″ have been seen though. One largemouth would have tipped a scale at over the 5 pound mark.
The crappies have been on the deeper edges and all the bass have been right along with them. Water depth of about 9 feet has been favored by all of the fish. On any cast that yields a fish you don’t know what is going to show up until after the hookset….the bass are evident then.
By far and away the Culprit PaddleTail has been the preffered bait on a 1/32 jighead, fished under a Mini-Stealth float. Minnows have shown zippo for results. Incidently, it is the junebug/chartreuse tail paddie that the fish seem to like so well. The BlueShad/chartreuse tail paddie has looped a couple fish, but none were crappies. Little need is to fish the jig much deeper than 5 feet.
The water temperature continues to yo-yo. It has been bouncing back and forth between 40 and 42 degrees….which it was this morning. With much less ice left on the lake this morning we should be seeing the water start to take on some heat and some real action take off….as soon as we can recover from the turn-over. The water was cloudier today than yesterday which makes me think that some confined areas may have gone thru a turn. We sure haven’t had any rain to do it and the melt has been quite easy going this year.
Man, its nice having a real rod in the hand again and to be fishing where I’m not confined to a hole….makes me feel like a skin-diver for Roto-Rooter getting ready to go to work, that ice fishing does. Yesterday I watched some morons fishing ice that had more holes in it than swiss cheese and they still had to run an auger for the three seconds of drilling when all they had to do was turn around and they’d have been in new water.
The tide has turned. Now mabe we can get down to some serious fishing.
Stay safe people!