Fishing

Dan Thiem took me and a buddy of mine out to Lake Zumbro in search of the putty cat. We got our lines wet around 5:30. After 2 hours we had landed 1 catfish (17”), and 2-3 sheephead. I had a HUGE fish on, but didn’t get a chance to see it. I’m guessing carp or big kitten. Grabbed the crawler on the bottom. It didn’t make any huge runs, but I couldn’t lift it off the bottom. It circled the nose of the boat a few times, and then got caught up on something on the bottom. Lost it and didn’t have a chance to see it.

We decided to try our hand at pannies for the last couple of hours of daylight. We ended up catching about 15-20 crappie, 5-10 silver bass, and a smallie or two. Most of the crappies were fair sized (9-11” I would guess). The silver bass were average and the smallie was pretty small. I don’t recall any gills off the top of my head, but I could be mistaken.

1/32 oz jig and 1” twister tail produced the best for the pannies (crappie). They were biting very short. We were missing almost every single fish and losing several twister tails. To remedy the problem, we cut off about ¾” from the grub (part that holds the twister tail to the jig). This put the twister tail much closer to the hook and we started to land some fish. All crappies were still biting short all evening. They wanted only the twister tail and were not aggressive enough to grab the whole jig. We were getting a little bite almost every cast, but only landing 1 per every 15-20 casts or so.

Does anybody have any other suggestions for short biting (nibbling) crappies? I changed the retrieval speed from super slow to fast, and it didn’t matter. The slower the jig moved the more bites it generated. Most of the time the fish didn’t even give a chance to set the hook. It would be a quick nip or bang and then nothing. Setting the hook, would result in replacing the missing twister tail.

Thanks for the trip Dan. Let’s do it again. We can take my boat next time.