I headed back out to the canal again on Friday before I had to go to work, thought I better get out there while the weather was still nice. The day didn’t start out all that well-we managed to bury the 4×4 a little bit, wasn’t sure we’d get out. The water is really down in this particular section of the canal, as you can see by the water marks in the pictures, so the ramp was real tricky. Where you regularly unload, you couldn’t very well because as soon as you got the boat in the water, there was a gravel ridge the boat wouldn’t float over. So I went off to one side, and found out it was REAL soft. I rolled the Crestliner off the trailer, and punched it in 4w low, and popped out, so that relieved me. Once we got out there, we started catching fish fairly quickly. A lot of the fish were only 1′ to 5′ down in the water column.
My Dad and I caught about 45 crappies together, I had probably 30 of them. I tried and tried to get Dad to do what I was doing, but he was content trying some different stuff. He was still catching fish though, so that was good. He managed to catch the first fish of the day, and as you can see, it was a real nice one.
My first fish of the day I’m sure wasn’t a crappie. It thumped the jig and stayed down, but then just spit it out after a short while. Really wish I coulda seen that. Dad did well on minnows, but I caught most all of mine on jigs. Once we found the color they wanted, we were in the game. And I’ve never seen this before: a lot of the crappie I caught were right below the surface of the water. If you couldn’t see your jig, then you were fishing too deep. I would just run my jig from side to side real slow, and watch them just come up and tackle it. It sure was a blast doing that. And a lot of the fish I caught doing that were nice ones too. A lot of our fish yesterday were in the 11-12″ range. Mostly on tube jigs, but a few on a roadrunner too. A guy and his son were fishing nearby from the shore and did pretty well dragging in crappie too. We ended the day trolling for about an hour or so, and tried to cover some shallow water up near the shore and get the outside line right on the dropoff. We had a fish on a white shad rap down about 14′ I’d say, but my Dad lost it. My Dad isn’t really what you might call an advanced angler, so it was kinda funny….he pulls the rod out of the holder and RIPS the rod toward the front of the boat about 3 or 4 times. I’m sure he just ripped that SR right out of the fish’ mouth. I told him not to act like he was Bill Dance on TV or something! 
As usual, all our fish went back. Hope to make it out again this next week. I just hope the water level comes up a little bit!
Sounds like a great way to spend some time with your dad!!
