Crappie Biting on deep running crank baits

I finally forced myself to go fishing. I've been so tired lately that I didn't even feel like getting the boat out. The weather was nice today winds were light with sunny skies. It was a beautiful day to be out on the water. I got a late start as I had chores to do this morning. I got on the water about 3 pm.

I immediately started fishing deep even though another fishermen who was getting of the water said he was catching them shallow. He was a bass fisherman with a big bass boat.

So I started with a bandit 300 and let out a lot of line. I added a trailer jig to the back of the crank bait and I'm sure glad that I did that. Most every fish I caught was on the trailer jig. :) :)

I started out catching about 3 really nice big bluegills along a drop off. But I then moved to an area I where I had caught some deep slab crappie this past April. Water temps are in the 70's no so I figured the fall pattern was about to begin. Most of my fish were caught over 30 ft to 22 ft of water. But I'm not sure how deep the cranks were running with the jig attached. The trailer jig must effect the depth of the crank bait a bit. Which is why I started using the smaller lead head jigs.

I was marking lots of fish at 24 ft to 30 ft deep and there were a lot of fish in the 4 to 6 ft depths. But the latter were shad balls. I saw a whole lot of shad swimming in big balls right at the surface. I'm guess that the crappie were below them and that was where they were. I got about 5 nice slabs before it got too late to fish. I must have missed 4 or five as I was going too fast and the hooks were pulling out of the crappie's paper thin mouths. I had one fish that was fighting me until it got about 30 ft from the boat and then the line went slack. **** the luck as it was the most aggressive fishing fish of the bunch. It might have been a bass or one big crappie. Crappie usually don't fight too hard after they have been hooked and dragged through the water for a bit. I don't always see the rod flexing right away.

Anyway I had fun to day and am glad I got the boat out and got to wet a line. All the crappie were longer than 10". I didn't get one small crappie.

I emptied the live well of water and added a large bag of ice to the live well after reinstalling the live well plug. The fish will be nice and cold by tomorrow and I should be able to clean them in the day light. I didn't get back home until after dark tonight. And I didn't feel like cleaning fish tonight. I'm ready for a shower and a glass of red wine and then off to bed to watch some TV.

I did take a couple of pictures of the fish inside the live well before I added the ice and after I drained all the water out of the live well. But it was dark and the camera's built in flash is not the greatest flash unit for taking pictures in the dark. I set the camera to medium fine resolution instead of the high resolution so the picture's memory size will be smaller but not too small. I'm hoping they turn out ok and can get installed on my computer easily. The camera can take 18 Mega Pixel sized pictures and those are too big to post directly only fishing.com.

I may take some more pictures tomorrow when it's light and I can use my new Garmin GPS camera. I know that I can upload the pictures of the Garmin GPS easily.

Bluegrass Pit was almost deserted this afternoon. I saw only 4 boat trailers in the parking lot. So the lake was empty where I fished.