Dog days fishin’

I'm starting to get in the groove of figuring out the electronics in finding fish. The biggest problem I had was, I couldn't get out of the mindset that every deeper tree or brush pile would/should have fish on them. What I have started to figure out is just how much fish move. I found some crappie last Friday in 22 feet of water around some fish attractors somebody had sunk. I caught several white crappie out of there but eventually got hung up and spooked the fish. Came back Monday and ran over the spot...not one single dot shows up on the graph, just barren limbs. I followed the creek channel out a bit and found another row of sunken fish attractors in 30 feet of water. The fish had moved about 100 yards to the other batch of attractors. I've started to only fish the spots if I see fish...that's the whole purpose of the fish finder I guess. But it's hard when I run over a beautiful tree in 20ish feet not to stop and try it...even if it's barren of life on the graph. Lol

And that's what separates "good fishermen" from "ok fishermen" . The ability to find fish even after they have moved and key in on the similar areas. If I'm finding the majority of fish at a certain depth or near certain structures or cover then I save time and skip pretty much everything else that doesn't fit that criteria.

sweet

Nice

Great topic!! We were out last evening graphing, you hit on a bunch of good points like, don't fish something if you don't see em, and if you don't keep looking till you find em. Both great points but, both hard to have discipline to do.

Takes a bit to master but once you do the reward is so much nicer! Well done.

I don't fish unless I see them BUT you can't just make one pass over a spot and rule it out. Many times I have rode over a spot just right on the third or fourth pass and there they are.

Night time was a different story. We took my niece last night to try fishing for them with the green lights. All my fish had vanished. It was barren/empty trees and brush. I couldn't even find my usual baitfish schools. I was just there that morning locating fish for the night trip. I had found one deep tree in 25 foot that was loaded with white crappie at around 11 am. Come back during the night just 12 hrs or so later and this same tree was completely empty. We set up on a few different places...starting on some humps. We never did draw loads of minnows to the lights nor see anything on the depth finder. I caught one lonesome yellow bass. Stayed out until 3 am. The shooting stars were extremely visible though. Must have saw 40+ of them.

Cool

Catching using crankbaits pretty cool!

FLTENNHUNTER1 said:

Catching using crankbaits pretty cool!

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Yep. Years ago in mid September my dad and I were on Chickamauga trying to learn that lake for bass fishing and were getting skunked. Dad was getting frustrated and moving spots a lot. Instead of using the outboard to move 100 yards or so, he would kick the trolling motor to high and just troll. I got lazy while he was doing that and had been throwing a deep diving crankbait and was tired of casting and reeling it back in so I just lobbed it a cast distance behind the boat and was trolling it while we moved. Let the trolling motor do the work. During one stretch I was watching the console depth finder and we came up on "something down there" and boom, I had a hookup. To my surprise a big 17.5 inch white crappie came up skiing on top. Dad says hmmm...let's go back through there again, at least we ain't skunked. We did and next pass another one. Then another one. We didn't have crappie jigs or grubs in the boat, just crankbaits and it didn't seem to matter. I was catching them on a Fat Free Shad crankbait. That day we brought back just shy of a 2 person limit and not a single fish under 12 inches. Went back a few days later with crappie jigs and such...couldn't catch anything but short fish and not many of them. Went back to trolling crankbaits and it was on again. We caught them like that up til about November. We've trolled them in the summer and fall ever since. I bought a book about 10-12 years ago that featured trolling crankbaits for crappie and they had it down to a science. I've adopted some of their tactics from the book although they liked Bandit cranks the best. I'm not shy to use bigger baits though...at least two in the pics are on a Strike King 6XD which is not a little crankbait at all.