Saturday Tom Bruggeman and I went down to Banner Creek Kansas to try to catch a few bass. After all the rain and severe storms we’ve had lately it was nice to get back out on the water.
We started out the morning about 6am in a cover on the lower end of the lake. While trying to get on a bass patter we picked up a couple bonus crappie, but it didn’t take long before hooking up with a bass. Our first few bass came on Black/Blue Flake Venom Salty Slings. The bass were right up near the bank in some very shallow water. Most were taken near shallow stumps. We fished through this cove in about an hour. We both left the cove with 4 bass each. None of them really had any size to them. It wasn’t until later when it got a little lighter we discovered that they were guarding fry.
The next place we tried was the dam. I was throwing a Lucky Craft SKT Mini crankbait and Tom was throwing a Bandit Brown Splatter crankbait. We each caught a couple fish along the dam, but they were pretty spaced out and a trip back down the dam didn’t produce anything so we decided to move.
We finished out the day fishing the upper end of the lake in the standing timber. We started out tossing soft plastics and jigs, but the bite was really slow. I tossed my crankbait around a little bit and picked up a few more bonus crappie along with a couple more bass. Then we went back to the Salty slings and the bite picked back up. Most of the bites were right next to the trees. If you didn’t get it within a couple inches of the tree they weren’t going to bite it. We fished the timber for most of the day. We caught more bass than we kept track up. In the last 45 minutes before we went in for some supper. I thought I’d try a small Lucky Craft Pointer to see if we could get anymore crappie. We found that the bass wouldn’t leave it alone. After losing a couple nice fish I wanted to put on a bigger jerkbait, something with bigger hooks. I tied on a LC Slender Pointer 97 in the mat pumpkin color and Tom tied on a Chartreuse Shad Live Pointer. We each picked up a few bigger bass along with a few more crappie.
Over all we had a good time fishing. There wasn’t really any size to the bass. It seems like they averaged about 15"-16" and all around 2 pounds. We talked to several other anglers who also didn’t find bass any bigger. After going in for supper we went back out to catch some crappie which you can read about in another report.
Thanks Jason! On to the crappie report…