central NE multi-species fishing

Saturday, August 1st found my buddy Joe and I out fishing the tri-county canal system. We met my buddy Chad Mayer and his son Jacob over there for an hour or so, and managed a few crappies right away. After they left, Joe made a suggestion that we try a few places we had before and see if any crappies were there. I was sure they just wouldn’t be in this location. I mean, it’s August! I’m sure glad I listened to Joe, because we really got into the crappies on Saturday. A certain plastic really out-performed our doll flies. This is a great location where there is a nice flat right at the top of a big drop. I’d feel comfortable saying that we caught upwards of 75 crappies on Saturday, with a few bonus LMB and sunfish/gills thrown in. Then in the evening, we headed over to Johnson lake in search of some white bass and maybe a walleye. The white bass stopped up on top as soon as we arrived, but we did find a way to get into some whites later on. Casting shad bodies into a specific area yielded us another 25 or so white bass, with a few nice ones mixed in. But the real catches were made by Joe, as you can see. He got both walleyes in the boat within about 3 minutes of each other. They went 21 1/2" and a nice chunky 24 1/2". I will be now be known as ‘net boy’. Hey, at least the location and tactics were my idea. We didn’t get them in the boat until about 2:30am.

I’ve been wanting to fish with Jay, a friend of mine, for a number of years now. So Tuesday, we finally met up and headed out to the canal. We started off targeting crappies, and we were able to get a few in the boat fairly quickly. But we really found the LMB. We ended up with probably 7-8 LMB in this particular spot, including this nice double.

In the same area, Jay noticed some surfacing white bass, so we headed right over to them and started in on them immediately. It was interesting seeing them do this in this area in the middle of the day, around 4pm. I didn’t realize what a great drop-off this area had, but it sure held the white bass. We got about 25 in the boat in a short amount of time with a few small wipers thrown in. Not bad at all. We then started a few trolling passes, and started adding to the multi-species board again. Right away, we hit a small channel cat on a Flicker shad going over a hump. Then we hit some more humps and got a 19 1/2" sauger in the boat on a Minnow Rap. We kept on hitting certain areas and hung up, so as we’re backing up to retrieve the crank, we had a wiggle wart hangin over the side of the boat. Jay meantion to me, "Have you ever had this happen before?" I asked what he meant, and he said he’s caught white bass right over the side of the boat doing the same thing. At just that instant, a nice whitey came up and hammered the wart! You know things are going well when that happens. We headed on, went over the same hump a litle later on, and drilled another sauger, this one being a dandy 20 3/4" speciment, almost a master angler! The Flicker Shads sure are a favorite with the fish.

We later headed over to Johnson to try for more whites and walleyes again. We did manage a few whites and wipers, and another species -drum- but struck out on the walleyes. Still, I don’t think we can complain about the fishing at all. This is some of the best August fishing I’ve ever had in the canal. In two days, we sure caught a load of fish, a lot more than I imagined. Hopefully it only gets better from here!