Marker Buoys when fishing

[Moveon]

I like to find a spot and then use the trolling motor to get upwind from the spot before throwing out a marker buoy. This way I can use the trolling motor going INTO the WIND and hover over the spot down wind of the maker. This way keep the lead anchor from dropping into the brush pile and scaring the fish.

The lake I fish is pretty barren of wood as it's an old coal strip pit that was mined and then some of the area was reclaimed around the deep pit but the pit itself was pretty much left as it was. Not sure how they got buy with that but they did. Now the State Dept of Natural Resources owns the land and water and give the public access to the area for hunting and fishing.

There is not a whole lot of cover in this water. If you find a single stickup it could be a fish magnet. But these single stickups are hard to pin point on the sonar. I often find myself crisscrossing the area several times from different directions before I can find this single stickup in 15 ft of water. I'm only really seeing about a 5 ft diameter circle under the transducer in 15 ft of water and if the stick up is not within that circle under my transducer it won't show up on the depth finder. Now if I'm up at Patoka the brush piles are huge and cover 50 square feet and are much easier to see on the SI and the DI screen. I can find them quickly.


If you looking for a single stump along a ledge then it may take a little while to actually pin point it on the sonar screen. In a case like this I would use my High tech Sonar and mark the spot as a Way Point. Any GPS can do this. But the thing is that the accuracy is only accurate to plus or ten ft most of the time. So if you are in shallow water you will only be seeing a small area under the transducer and may not see the stump.


I love days when it's calm and I can find a spot and just sit over it without dropping the anchor. One these days I will move very slowly over the spot from many different directions. I'll go at a very slow speed of say maybe 1.0 mph or less. Sometimes the crappie I like to catch want the bait moving but very slowly. They will hit it if it's just sitting there in front of them too but at times they like it to move ever so slowly. So keep this in mind.

Start out fishing the top and edges of the brush pile and pick up those fish that are willing to come up or out of the brush to bite. Then after you catch these start fishing into the brush pile. Sometimes the fish are buried deep in the brush pile. Bright sunny days may find the crappie hiding in the shadows produced by the wood of the brush piles.

I like to use a drop shot below the hook. I tied the hook onto the line with a loop knot and leave a long tag line to attach the finesse drop shot to the tag line. This way if the hook gets hung up when I'm pulling the rig up out of the brush pile I can simply drop the rod tip and let the weight pull the hook free from Below the branch. Normally if you are careful and don't dig the hook into the wood hard you can get the hook lose by simply droping the tip of the rod and let the weight of the weight below the hook pull the hook off the wood. Then simply bring the hook back up though the brush.

Some times I'll go with a weed less jig setup. I take a 1/16 oz lead jig and drill a small hole into the lead where I can stick a short piece of 30 lb test fishing line. I glue the heavy line into the hole with super glue. Drill the hole so that the heavy line sticks into the jig head and angles out to cover up the point of the hook. This way the heavy line protects the hook gap and the point of the hook and makes it semi weedless. The length of the heavy line sticking out of the jig can be trimmed with scissors to just reach the tip of the hook in the hook gap. When a fish takes the jig his mouth will depress the heavy line down and then expose the hook point. You may lose a few bites and you won't hook as many fish with the weed protector as with an open hook but then again you won't get hung up in the brush as often either. In really deep water go with a heavier jig 1/8 oz.

[sweetwater]

No attitude....Almost without fail when I am fishing a bank, ledge, etc....some bubbas come riding in and cut in front of me at least once everytime I am on the water. I think the lake is big enough that you can fish another bank until I am done and have moved on or get behind me if that bank is so good.

Now you want to put buoys out to hold a spot....not happening. I use buoy markers, fish that spot then pick them up...if I leave them I expect them to be gone.

I have discovered in the few years I have been fishing that most folks are fairly polite and considerate....but there are always the ones that think they are priviledged. And it seems to becoming more prominant.

I can't figure out why someone would leave a marker on a spot that's good enough to return to later. It seems to me you would be telling everyone else that there's a good spot there. Regardless, I would never intentionally destroy someone else's property for any reason. Instead of feeling like I taught them a lesson it would make me feel like I lowered myself down to their level.

[Moveon]

Once in a while I forget to pick up a marker buoy and it's usually gone when I remember that I left it and go back to try to find it. But then I've got the good kind of markers. Normally I retrieve them before leaving a spot. And I don't use ten markers anymore like I did when I first started using them years ago. I use to mark a long ledge with them and then try to troll cranks along the outside part of that ledge or drop off. It just got to be too much work and didn't really help me catch any more fish.

These days I just buy a topo map or hydrographic map of the lake I fish that shows the contours in 1ft intervals and the Humminbird SI unit shows a map view with an icon that represents my boat on the map. So I can see where the drop off are located on the hydrographic map and where my boat is in relation to the drop off at all times using GPS technology and Lake Master Maps that are on SDHC cards that I simply plug into my Humminbird Unit.

The only problem is the map accuracy and the limitations (accuracy limits) of the GPS system itself. Only accurate to Plus or minus 3 meters 95% of the time.

But the main complaint is that the State IDNR did the lake survey and they didn't cover the entire lake bottom during the survey. I watched them doing the survey at the South End of BlueGrass Pit. So I know where they went with the boat and the equipment that day. I even talked to the girl that did the survey for the State. It was cold that day and they got in a hurry and skipped a lot of the lake bottom. She told me how they used a computer program to interperlate the data. They use a program similar to AutoCad to drop the topo lines but they have to guess about areas that they didn't cover. There are areas in Bluegrass that have bottoms that come up and go back down a lot more than a normal lake would. This area was man made when they mined the ground and it's not a consistant bottom contour. So the program that's predicting where the drop off is going to be is off by about 50 ft in some areas of the lake. That's bad if you are trying to follow a contour and the map is not accurate. The map shows your boat in 20 ft of water and your depth finder says you are in 5 ft of water. Not good for slow trolling for crappie. Other areas of the lake are more accurate on the map view. But the one area where I've caught limits of fish is where the surveyors missed big time.

I Noticed that the survey boat only did East/West transverses and didn't go North/South. Which is why she missed a lot of the lake bottom. In other words she half-assed the survey.

And Lake Master must have purchased the data from the State of IN as I don't see where they claimed to have performed the survey themselves.

The saving grace is that next years Lake Master is going to sell a new program that will allow us to make changes to the maps. Auto map Pro will also let me show the lake bottom using Side Scanning Data and I can add new data points to the map to help redefine the contour lines on the hydro graphic map of my lake. But this new SDHC card will set you back about $250 for the Pro version and another 100 bucks for the lower priced version.

Check out the LakeMaster Web site for further details. Do a Google search on Lakemaster to find the web site link.