The Mississippi River pool 10 is finally back down to her normal summer stage…
With the good comes the bad as well.. I can’t stress enough that the wing dams I have been fishing are now a mere foot or so below the water… If you are not familiar with the buoy system on the river you need to be if you’re planning to spend a day on the river..
I was watching a boater run the river on Saturday.. I was fishing the inside of a wingdam when he decided to come between me and the buoy… You guessed it… he found the bottom with his lower unit… OUCH !!! he was able to motor away with just a snapped off skeg…
On to the best part of this report !!!
The WD’s are still going strong !!! I have been running these man made rock piles for several weeks now and they continue to produce nice fish each time out… the only thing that has changed is the dive curve of my Rapala Crank Baits..
#5 JSR’s in craw patterns were working real well this outing… It really didn’t matter wether I was on the inside, middle or the tips wof the wd’s there were fish in each place !!!
Even some crazy cat fish on the insides.. Man O Man do these baby’s fight !!!
I have been spending a lot of time with the side scan imaging on …tooling around the river looking for anything that would hold fish.. I came across two rock piles in a place I never knew were there before… I pulled up in front of one of them and dropped doen the terrova with spot lock and started pitching a #5 JSR Fire Crawdad and on my second cast I pulled a small sauger… on my 6th cast or so I pulled this healthy 25" eye !!! I popped her in the live well quick to see if she had any girlfriends out for a swim with her…but I missed the pod… When I pulled her out for a quick pic before letting her go I noticed several crawdad parts in the bottom of my livewell !!! She knew what she wanted !!!
Getting out at 0530 is not quite what the fw calls weekend RnR… So at about 1100 I met up with her at the boat landing to spend a beautiful day out in the Ranger on the Mississippi..
We did the old fasion hook and crawler trick on the wigdams for some meaty gills !!! I wanted to try out the VMC circle hooks on these gills to prevent them from swallowing the hook and haveing to put the smaller gills in the livewell to clean.. What I found was when the lil gills would take the crawler…I would set the hook with a lite sweep and they would not get hooked up and when they did it either hooked them in the corner of the mouth or they swallowed it.. Best thing is when they did swallow it I could pull the hook out without any damage to the fish…
get out and enjoy the water everyone because
The Tug is the Drug !!!
Always interesting to here about the pan fish you guys have on the wing dams down south. Dont see a lot of that up here. Then again this last weekend I did pull a crappie of a dam on pool 2. Even found a sunfish on a back water rock point. Most years I could count the number of panfish we catch on pool 2 on one hand.
Casting cranks to WD or any rock structure is a very fun way to put a diverse bag of fish in the boat….great job.
Very cool looking sunfish in the pic Koonce. Ever get any of those panfish on cranks?
The hooks are a bit big on most of the cranks I have been throwing.. but last Sat I was throwing the #5 Rippn Rap and landed two gills !!! those trebles are just the right size !!
Give the Rapala Ultra Light Shad a try!
Small 1/8th oz bait that is very good on panfish trolled or casted. They are a slow sinking bait as well to get a bit deeper if needed.
On an UL St. Croix !!!
I will do Cal !!!
thanks for the heads up
Hi im Mark im new on here looking for someone to chat with about pool 10 I fish the Harpers Ferry area periodically,looking to make some friends on here.
Hello Mark !!!
Welcome to IDO !!
Hey thanx for the message, I like to troll for walleye, been fightin the weeds a lot the last couple trips. Any ideas on how I could get a lil info on the weed flow before I plan on headin that way? I got about a 2 1/2 hour drive to get there.