I was out on Saturday for a full day of fishing. I started on Peltier and finished the day off on Prior Lake. I set up at about 6:30 am on Peltier in about 13ft of water. I immediately began marking fish. I started catching crappies one after another, but they were all about 6 inches. Once the sun came up I began catching small sunnies. The spot I chose slowed down at about 9 so I began making swiss cheese out of the ice and started hole hopping. I continued to catch a lot of fish, but the size was small. I ended staying on Peltier until 11:00 am with only 1 crappies worth keeping. This was very weird considering the last couple of outings on Peltier I didn’t catch a ton of fish, but they were all keepers.
Since the morning was not a real great outing I moved down to Prior Lake. It is a little far, but I like fishing the lake. As long as you can get away from the crowds it seems to be a pretty decent fishing Lake. I set up in about 14ft of water and threw down the camera. The sunnies were stacked in at every depth. I began catching some decent fish that would have been keepers, but decided to throw them back since it was only about 1:30 pm. It turned out to be the wrong thing to do though. After the initial couple of sunnies all I caught were small ones. There were plenty of hogs down below the ice I could see on camera, but the little ones would rush in a take the bait right away.
I did spot a few notherns on the camera. None of them wanted anything to do with me though. Once their was about 15 mins left before sundown, I began catching crappies. They were suspended about 7 ft off the bottom. I was catching the crappies on all sorts of presentations from a demon jigging spoon tipped with a minnow head to a small pink diamond jig with a waxie or larvae. I ended keeping 8 nice crappies for the frying pan and 2 sunnies. When I left I was still marking fish, but had to get going.
I caught a lot of fish for an all day outing, but didn’t catch the size that I wanted. Still nothing beats a day on the ice regardless of how many fish are caught.
