Every year I try to make a trip from the east metro to fish spring pan fish on Minnetonka. Yesterday was the day and it sure felt great to fish a lake again. It’s easy to be out of practice (an a year older), after a long winter It’s harder to roll the boat off and on the trailer. What use to be an easy walk down the tongue of the trailer to hook and unhook the boat ends more often with a miscue and wet shoes.
The back bays were filled with bluegills and after spot jumping I found a bay was not just filled with bluegills; that their were crappies in the mix. The shallow water and still cold temperatures made the bit fussy. The fish were very spooky and tended to hold the bait in their mouth with no pull making detecting the bit difficult. To catch them I had started to play around with size, color, and the best presentation to separate the blue gill bites from the crappies.
I used minnows and waxies on a small flu flu underneath a bobber to find the fish. Whenever I can I like to fish with plastics without bait so I experimented with different colors of flu flu jigs and plastics. I found the slow pull didn’t work, the soft pump and stop. Not really. So I sized the plastic up and did the hard pop and stop. Pop and stop. Most of my fish came on puddle jumpers from http://ozarkfishing.com/site/puddle-jumpers/about . The extra bulk in the tail made of a slower fall rate. This was the first time I used these and I think they will become a staple in my tackle box this summer.
I would expect this bite will hold up very nicely over the next weeks, with late ice up north this might be a good time to stay closer to home. With all the bluegill in the back bays the kids would have a blast.
