Fished Otter Pit Tuesday

I took the boat out Tueday afternoon and fished with some big shiners that I purchased at the Evansville Worm Ranch. I normally buy the smaller chubs but I forgot and said ok when Mat asked if I wanted the medium shiners. My bad. But it worked out ok. The smaller crappie can't get their mouth's around this bigger shiners. I got lots of bits but could not hook them. That's usually not the case with the smaller chubs. But the fish I caught were much larger than the average crappie that I catch at Bluegrass Pit.

I hooked one nice while crappie that measured over 12" (his tail was over the measuring device) and the other scale showed him a tad over 12" long. The digital scales measured her at 12 Oz. I would have sworn it was heavier as it was full of eggs. The eggs were not ripe yet. The blood vessels surrounding the egg sac was not bright red and there were no visible blood vessels on the egg sacs that I could see. I can pretty much tell when the eggs are ripe as I have cleaned a lot of crappie over the years in various stages of egg development.

The other crappie were all about 8" or 9". I was given one crappie by another fisherman as he didn't want to clean it. So I cleaned 6 crappie last night and put the fillets in salt water inside a contain and stored in the refrigerator over night. I'll pacakage them up this morning and put them in the freezer.

I caught about 6 or 7 regular crappie at Bluegrass on Monday afternoon.

Water temperature had risen to about 55 or 56 Deg F at the surface of Otter Pit.

I caught the big crappie on a drop off where it went from over 40 ft to around 4 ft. I caught him in 7 ft of water slow trolling a minnow on a drop shot rig. I was only going about 1 mph or less. Just barely moving and had the bait right out off the front of the boat next to the trolling motor. She put up a pretty good fight and I used a net to haul her in. The hook broke off as the drop shot was stuck in her mouth. I guess the hook had gone though her lip and only the drop shot weight was holding her on the line. I broke the line trying to remove the weight from here lip. Had to tied on a new loop knot and put on a new hook after that. I marked the spot with a floating buoy but didn't get any other fish to bite. So I trolled around the area to see what the bottom looked like. I've caught fish before in the area so I knew it held some bigger crappie.

I did run the humminbird around the lake and saw lots of fish signals in deeper water. I saw some huge bait schools in 25 and even 40 ff of water. But who knows what type of fish they are. They could be carp for all I know or catfish down that deep. There is a layer of denser water near the bottom that comes up about 10 to 20 ft off the bottom of Otter Pit.

I didn't see any "Box Trucks" down there though. :(

I did call Sugar Ridge and talked with Sam Whiteleather about the new growth of the "Green Algae" in these lakes at Bluegrass F&W. He's aware of the algae and need to get some research done at to what this algae is and how to manage it. Right now there is nothing in the budget to kill the excessive algae growth. But he is talking to the Fishery Biologist about this problem. It's also a good thing for the fish as it helps provide habitat for aquatic insect growth. This give the invertibrate and other aquatic insects a place to hide and reproduce. This means more food for the young of the year crappie and other fish. Lots of fish survive on aquatic insects in their earlier years of life before switching over to a diet of gizzard shad and other small fish.

The key to managing these lakes it to have enough underwater aquatic vegetation to support the the ecosystem but not so much that it interfers with our fishing.

I sucked up some of that algae into my water intake for the live well and could not put any water into the live well Monday. I had to take the pump apart Tue and clean it out to get the live well pump working again. So be careful if you get your boat into shallow water as this stuff is all around the edge of the lake. Even at the ramp it's thicker than snot.