My year has been hectic. Last year, I was crappie fishing two or three times per week. This year, I’ve been slammed and haven’t even gotten to go. Granted, I’m having a great year; it’s just that it hasn’t included crappie fishing. I miss that. Crappie fishing is a low-stress outing. They’re not exceptionally hard to catch, you catch big numbers of them, and they’re in the top three freshwater fish to eat in America. My family loves to fill our freezer with crappie, and we eat like kings all year.
In our locale, we have three options for serious crappie fishing and these three options have varying degrees of success each year so you have to hit all three to determine which lake is the best that year. I’m talking about CJ Strike, Brownlee and Lake Owyhee reservoirs.
I hadn’t been to Owyhee in a year, so Katy and I ran over there to check it out. Whoa, we’d waited too late in the year. The lake was down about 500 feet. OK, maybe I’m being a bit dramatic but it has to be down at least 20 feet. My normal holes are now nonexistent! We fished for two hours and had three fish.
Now for Plan B. We still had to get some crappie in the freezer. We hit another spot but I figured the crappie fishing had crashed for the season. About dusk though they moved in shallow feeding and things livened up.
We started off catching some in the shadows but by dusk they had moved up to within a foot of the banks. I’d flip a jig tipped off with a 2 ¼-inch Mister Twister tail on it and they’d slam it. We were out from the bank and would cast within inches of it. It seemed to work best to lift your rod tip and reel slowly. Of course right up by the shore you had to reel a little faster or you’d hang up and then you could slow down as you got out further from the bank.
Katy was getting hits right up by the boat. In fact, one hit right at the boat. I told her to quit reeling them in so close to the tip of the rod but according to her he had hit when the jig was in and she about to cast again. Who knows but the rod tip was halfway down into his stomach!
It depends on how windy it is, how deep you’re fishing and how far you want to cast but we were using 1/8 and ¼ ounce Mister Twister Chartreuse or orange jigs tipped off with blue or silver colored plastics. I think presentation is more important than color.
Gee am I glad that I’ve got a Honda boat motor on my jon boat now instead of the electric trolling motor. Used to I always had to worry if I fished too far from the truck or if a big wind kicked up that I wouldn’t be able to make it back. Now I can venture out further and stay later. With the trolling motor it took a lot longer to make it back. Now I can fish later and zip back faster.
As it got later the fishing got increasingly better. The last 30 minutes I was getting a hit every cast. Most of our fish were decent sized. We didn’t throw back even 20 fish.
I took a bottom bouncer and wanted to try to find some perch but that never transpired. I drug it for a little bit tipped off with a worm but all I got was one or two catfish. If you can catch one perch then anchor because they are a schooling fish and if you can locate the school by catching one you should be able to load up on them. The same with crappie actually.
Well, we ended up with half a cooler of fish and had a great time. It was good to get away with Katy. I haven’t got to be with her much lately. She took Joel Rosenberg’s new book titled “The Beirut Protocol” and she read it to me on the way over and back. It’s a great book. You ought to check it out. In fact, you ought to check out the whole Marcus Ryker series.
Tom Claycomb lives in Idaho and has outdoors columns in newspapers in Alaska, Idaho, Utah, Nevada, Colorado and Louisiana. He also writes for various outdoors magazines and teaches outdoors seminars at stores like Cabela’s, Sportsman’s Warehouse and Bass Pro Shop. He can be reached via email at smileya7@aol.com.
