Deer Creek Crappie

I was shopping at Gander Mountain tonight and could have used that extra gift cards. LOL

I picked up a camo cover for my boat motor. Someday I will get the rest of the boat camouflaged and be able to take it out duck hunting in the future. One thing at a time.

That Gander Mountain Store has everything you need to catch Big Crappie. They even have some Rosy Red Minnows from Arkansas and some huge shiners. I almost purchased a couple dozen of those Rosy reds from my aquarium crappie. But at $1.50 a dozen that's too high of a price from what I am accustomed to. I can get a 1/4 lb of them for $3.00 and that's equivalent to 5 or 6 dozen of them 1.5 " minnows.

My crappie will have to eat honey Ham again this week.

I did find out that crappie in cold water can go a long time without eating. That's less poop and pee in the water during the colder months.

I picked up a quiver rabbit tonight also. I have it stuck inside a 5 gallon bucket full of Compose. It came with this plastic stake that you drive into the ground and then set the rabbit thing on top of the stake. There is a round battery operated disk thing with a counter weight inside that goes around the pivot point inside the housing and this makes a wire shake. There a rabbit shaped fur that sits onto of this bent over coat hanger that's wobbling around. There is an on/off button and it runs on only 2 AA batteries. Since the ground outside is frozen I could not drive the 12" long plastic stake into the ground so I filled a bucket full of loose compost that I had in a sack and that was left over from my garden this past spring. This made it easy to push the stake into the compost inside the bucket. Now I can put the rabbit thing anywhere in the yard by simply moving the bucket to a new spot. hehe

I have a small portable predator caller that I am trying out on the back porch. It's got five sounds and I have used this Electronic Caller before to call in a OWL. But it's been two months or so since I called that Owl in. After a while he got wise and figured out that the dying rabbit call was not really supper. I am hoping that with the extra decoy movement I might be able to entice him back onto the porch tonight

I am waiting a while to let things calm down so I came online to read any new posts about fishing.

My main reason for coming to fishin.com tonight was to make a post about finding some 2" long baby Gizzard Shad along the edge of the ice at the boat ramp at Otter Pit this evening.

I am guessing that with the ice on top of the lake that the shade came to the concrete ramp to find some warmer water. As the ice coving the lake is melting today. The ice right at the edge of the water and concrete has access to the air. And the ice is very clear so sunlight can reach the grass under the ice in the shallow water. There are three different types of submergent vegetation in Otter Pit. Milfoil is one of them. Leafy pond-weed is another I think. I'll have to read that Carnahan report about the lakes in Bluegrass F&W area to figure out what vegetation exists in these pits. But it's putting out Dissolved Oxygen and the water right under the ice must be warmer than the bottom as the sun is shinning today. Normally if it's cooling down the water at the bottom is the warmest. Water's funny this way.

The main thing I am figuring out is that when it's near freezing and there is ice on the lake the fish may be either very shallow or very deep. It depends on temperature trends over the past day or hours. If it's warming up the fish will head to the warmer water right under the ice and into the weeds. If it's getting colder over a long time then these fish head for the very bottom of the lake where that's the warmer water. Here they can feed on worms in the muck. They follow the minnows and shad I guess.

Today the shad had come to the edge of the lake and died. I took a picture of many of them with my cell phone camera. It's not a very good camera and the details is hard to see. And it cost me $0.25 to send the picture to my cell phones photo board. I have to email the pictures to myself to be able to make a copy of them. I can only view them on my cell phone' screen otherwise. I saw where they have a new cell phone with camera that can use a SD disk. I wish I had that one instead of this one. Then I could take pictures and use my Dazzle SD reader and put them directly into my hard drive on my computer. That would be free? It might be worth the money to buy the new cell phone just for taking pictures. But then again the camera is only 1.3 MegaPixels and that's not a very good resolution camera. Details get washed out and pixelated. To get good digital pictures I would like to have a 10 MegaPixels camera or better. But they cost about $890 for the one I want.

Anyway I wanted to talk about the Gizzard Shad that were dying and trapped right under the ice. Tonight as the sun set the water is probably refreezing and those shad will be trapped in the ice again. Now this weekend it's getting much warmer and will rain.

Thanks for the heads on on the crappie at Deer Creek. I'll bet that this Saturday or Sunday one could catch some of them crappie if the water in the river is still coming up.

Someone told me to find where the dirty river water meets the cleaner creek water and fish that area. That may be where the crappie are located at time. I guess the conditions have to be just right. No rain here but lots of rain up river. That way you will have a zone where fresh creek water mets the dirty river water. Now if it's raining here too then the creek water may be just as muddy as the river.

Did your friend tell you which way the water in the creek was flowing? Down to the River or backing up as the river rose?

I need to make a link directly to the web site that tells the river levels each hour. I think would help figure out when to go fishing in those creeks.

What really surprised me was the size of the dead gizzard shad. I would have thought that they would be bigger. These are perfect size for bass and crappie to eat. They were not too big for a 10" crappie to swallow.

Last fall I ran into a school of 12" to 11" crappie and had a blast catching about a dozen of these fish. That was the first time I have run into larger crappie at this pit. All the other times I could catch 30 to 50 of the 8" to 9" long crappie. Hopefully by taking some of the 8" fish out of the water this has let the other's have more food and that's why they seem to be getting bigger. But then again last fall in 2006 I was catching larger crappie than in the summer months. All were caught in 6 ft to 7 ft of water near shallow water and deep water. They were in the grass too. But there are some natural bushes that were growing at the 6 to 7 ft level before the lake was flooded. They have not rotted away yet and man the crappie like that woods. I guess there is a lot of insect live living in and around the roots or in the wood tissue.

Two years ago we had some ice formed on these strip pits and as the ice was melting I noticed about a dozen sea gulls out sitting at the edge of the ice feeding on something. I could not tell what it was but now I'll be that it was those baby shad that died and floated up to the surface and got trapped in the ice. As the ice melted it gave the gulls a free meal.
The ice cold water keeps the dead fish fresh for a while longer than in the summer time. The sea gulls got fat off those excess shad.