Going to Patoka Lake today

Anyone been fishing Patoka Lake this month? Any good suggestions on where to find the crappie? I'll be fishing with a friend who knows the lake well. I suspect that he will want to fish deep brush piles as that what he prefers to do most of the time.

I'll try to write a report when I get back home tonight. We fish with minnows and either tight line (drop shot) over brush piles or cast out with light weight jigs and let them sink down and then reel in really slow to maintain the correct depth. He has a Humminbird 1197 on the consol and a 9XXX series on the bow with Quadrabeam Sonar on the Trolling motor. This way he can find the brush piles using SI and 455 KHz and then zero in on the brush pile using the quadrabeam while fishing off the front of the boat. The quadrabeam transducer tells him which way the fish are from the front of the boat. He can rotate the trolling motor around to rotate the sonar beam in any direction 360 deg around the front of the boat. So he knows whether to cast ahead or off to the left or right of the front of the boat while fishing these small jigs.

The last time I went fishing with him I forgot about him having the quadrabeam at the front and wondered why he was catching more crappie with jigs than I did. Now I know his secret. LOL I wish he had dual seats upfront so we could both sit up front and see the front depth sounder screen. I get to sit in the back of the boat with his dog.

His little dog likes to kill any crappie that falls down in the bottom of the boat. He will try to snatch them off the line if you let him. He's quick and will bite any crappie that flops around in the boat. At first it's funny to watch but after a while it gets a little bit annoying. Especially if we are keeping the crappie to eat. But most of the time we already have enought crappie fillets in the freezers and we throw the crappie back in the lake unless it's a really big one that I want to take home to show off.

Saturday was a nice day but it was a little chilly and very windy. Boat control in the wind was a big problem that we didn't want to mess with, so we chose to go to a quiet cover and look for brush piles to fish. Fishing was tough. Caught a crappie and one bass. It got up into the low 60's and the winds were blowing steady at around 15 to 20 mph. Water surface temperature was in the low 50's. We saw fish about 20 to 25 ft deep and found a whole lot of brush piles in deeper water. But all those were exposed to the wind and trying to hold over those brush piles in that wind without getting hung up in deep water brush piles was not going to happen this day.

We fished from about noon to until around 5 PM CST. I had a good time but didn't catch a lot of fish or anything to brag about. Maybe the next time I'll hit it big.

It seems that I catch more crappie going to Bluegrass than I do going to Patoka Lake these days. But when I do catch crappie at Patoka Lake they are fat little footballs with a lot of meat on them. We do a lot better at Patoka when it's calm.

We may put in some brush piles in some coves without much cover in the month's ahead.

Beavers are taking over the area at Patoka. I saw lots of trees that had been cut down by the Beavers. And you can see their trails on the hillsides where they walk up and down the hillside and drag wood back to their lodges.

Also noticed that a storm had uprooted many of the older trees on the hillsides. It looks like a disaster area in some spots. Especially up by the Spillway on the South Side hills of that area.

Water was up a bit since all the rain but the lake is clear and we did see some small patches of grass along the banks and in the back of the coves. Grass can be seen easily on the SI sonar unit.

We saw some huge brush piles in very deep water at the North End of Lick Fork in the big curve of the channel right before you get to the No Ski Bouys. There is a big cliff and it drops off steeply along the curve of the bank and hillside. We figured they were put there by the Corp of Engineers who worked in this area for a few years before the lake was totally flooded in 1978.

I wore my Rockey Long Johns underneath my new Frogg Toggs Toadz Bibs and XXL Jacket. With a life jacket over the Frogg Toggs Jacket and a warm sock hat I was warm and comfortable in 50 deg F weather with the high winds. Hands stayed warm enough that I really didn't need gloves as the day wore on and it warmed up to 62 deg F by 5 pm. We checked the thermometer on the doorway to the cabin at Wickliffe RV resort.