USI Crappie University learn how to crappie fish

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The Trollers Bible is a book that I purchased several years ago and used with great success on Blue Grass Pit in Warrick County, IN at the Bluegrass Fish and Wildlife Area. I got the good at Gander Mountain or I sent off for it and bought it over the internet. I also tried the planer boards that are used to take the baits out to the side of your boat so that the boat doesn't have to pass over the shallow water where the crank bait are running. I quit doing this at Bluegrass Pit got too crowded for me to drive my boat along the break lines (structural drop offs) without running into some other boat. Now if the lake is not crowded and it's a hot summer day around Noon this technique works very well.

I tried to see if Russ ever used or knew about tying a trailer jig to the back hook of a bandit 300 mistake crank bait and use that to catch fish but Russ seem uninterested in this method. But I found that it will catch fish when nothing else will in the hot summer months. What I discovered in using the Precision Trolling bible is that I was not allow enough line out to get the baits down to right over the thermocline. My Humminbird 898C SI unit was no lying to me when it showed lots of fish suspended down around 20 to 25 ft deep. So when I let out more line (10# Stern Mono for the main line) the cranks went down deeper. Make sure that the crank bait is tuned to run straight. That's why I like the Bandits as they are tuned right out of the box. I've also use the old balsa wood Bomber baits (coachdog waterdog) in white back ground with brown spots on it. These will catch crappie and bass. If you wonder where the fish went during the dog days of summer this will show you where they are and hot to get them to bite. They are reaction bites by neutral fish that are suspended up off the bottom but still deep below the surface and over the DEEPEST parts of the lake. Look for areas that drop from 20FT down to 40Ft and then 60 ft which is about as deep as Bluegrass Pit gets. I discovered this by accident. I was going to fish the points and shore line drops on the South end and East side of the pit. But in order get 200 ft. of line out back behind the boat it took a while. So I figured I'd go out over the deep water, deploy the line/bait and then swing around towards the shoreline breaks or drops and troll them. But before I could get the line all the way out just after leaving the ramp area I had a bass on the crank bait and it was up on the surface dragging the fish behind the boat. I had to reel the fish in and put it back in the water. Short Bass as the limit at Bluegrass is 18" long. So all short bass get returned to the water IMMEDIATELY after I catch them. This is critical especially in the hot summer months when the surface water are so hot that they don't hold as much dissolved oxygen as the subsurface waters. Waters in the deeper areas around 15 to 25 ft. is much cooler and may hold more Dissolved Oxygen. I' can't test this theory until I get my YSI Dissolved Oxygen meter fixed and that will cost at least $300 for a news probe with a longer cable on it for my unit. This is a research grade unit that I use.

Now the key to this method is the use about 18" of a 6 lb. Stren mono to tie on a 1/16 oz. lead head jig with a soft plastic bait on the jig head. I use the Squirmin Squirts in White Lightning 1.5" long baits from Bass Pro Shops. Add a crappie nibble to the bait's hook too. Now tie a stainless steel swivel to one end of the line and the bait to the other end. I use the palmar knot for this. Attack the swivel to the back split ring that holds the rear treble hook on the crank bait body. Now your ready to troll this combination out the back of the boat.

Now I'm just really getting started at this. So I only use one pole most of the time. I have my boat setup for two poles as I have two rod holders. I use a ski mirror on my console so I can drive the boat and watch the pole on my starboard Side at the same time. If I'm fishing by myself in the hot summer months I'll put an umbrella up over my seat to keep the sun off me a bit. It also helps me see the sonar screen better in the shadow of the umbrella.

Like Russ said in the lecture last Monday Night the water temperature should be in the 80's or above at the surface. The water temperature ten feet down is around 70 deg. or ten degrees cooler. And down around 25 ft. it's much cooler water than at the surface. This is why the fish are there in the middle of the day. They may be in a neutral mood. Maybe they are sleeping. I don't scuba dive anymore as my equipment sat in the hot attic in my house for years and then dry rotted the straps for my scuba mask and other things. Beside my health won't allow me to scuba dive by myself and even when I was young I never went diving by myself. Always have a dive partner with you in case you get into trouble. I saved a friend once when he ran out of air at 80 ft below the surface and I stopped him from accelerating up to the surface when he panicked big time. I grabbed his foot and pulled him back down to me and offered him my regulator and then we buddy breathed our way back up to the surface slowly so as not the get the bends. He would have died if I had not done that. He forgot to check his tank pressure before the dive. Just as he forget to take his sea sick pills which caused him to puke when we got back to the boat. I ended up diving with some stranger who wanted to spear fish. The thing with this guy is that he didn't bring the fish back up after he got them on his tether line. He cause blood and even worst (thrashing fish movements in the water) and this attracted sharks in about 10 minutes or less. We saw them circling us and I decided it was time for Him and I to get out of the water and go dive some where else. He didn't like that and went and speared another fish. Now he had to live fish on his tether line. The spear went right though the fish and out the other side so the fish had the line that attaches the spear to the spear gun going though it's side. The fish could still thrash around on the long loose tether line. After I got out of the water the dive captain had to bring all 20 of the divers out of the water because of the stupidity of my dive partner. The captain told him before we went into the water that if he speared a fish he was to bring it up to the boat right away. So my second partner ruined the dive for everyone. You learn a lot about fish by observing them under the water.

I wish I had one of those under water TV cameras to deploy at times. But the water has to have good visibility for those to be really useful. Our dive was off the coast of Panama Florida and the water visibility was only about 40 ft. I was used to diving in the Florida Keys or in rock quarries at home that have great water visibility such as 200 ft.

Anyway sorry for the distractions. Try the Precision trolling this summer and see if you don't some fish. Or stay home in the AC and watch summer TV programs. The decision is yours.

PS: When I was very young (8 years old) I started going down to KY lake with my father. We would rent a boat and bass fish on the main lake and the bays or creek channels. We fished some of the islands out on the lake on the West Side of the lake just North of Cypress Bay. We use two oars back in those days and they were much quieter than today's trolling motors. So we often would use the gas motor to go up above a fishing spot and then let the wind push us back over the fishing area quietly. This worked great unless you got hung up on a stump and have to row into the wind or use the motor to go try and retrieve the crank baits. But one day we were motoring from the head of one island to another fishing spot not too far away. So I allowed my crank bait to be dragged behind the boat. Lo and behold I caught fish doing that. In just a short distance I'd have a sauger or a crappie hit the crank bait and I'd reel in a nice big fat crappie. Now this was in the early 1960. I had rediscovered what the Herters Guide Book had been writing about all by myself. I've also caught large mouth bass on KY lake that were in the 4lb. to 6lb. range by dragging Buck Perry's Spoon Bills behind the boat with lead core line and a ocean type fishing reel. That was fun. Have you read Buck Perry's book on Spoonbilling?

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Last night at the Crappie University Class at USI the guest speaker was Doug Sikora. He goes by High Tide on crappie.com too. He's a very personable guy and just loves fishing and especially crappie and perch fishing. If you check out his Instagram site [email protected] you will see some of his pictures of the fish he catches.

Doug talked a lot about the life cycle of the zoo plankton and how they effect the food chain all the way up to the bigger fish. How sunlight effects the movement of the zoo plankton up and down in the water column with the rising and setting sun. How sunlight effect the bite and how the different baits and colors effect the bite. He taught the class how to tie a loop knot to make sure that the jig hangs straight and parallel with the lake bottom or the horizon and doesn't hang with the head up in a vertical position or down in that vertical position. He talked about drop shots fishing and how to tie the jig on the main line leaving a long tag line for the weight to hook onto at the bottom. I used that setup years ago in the 1950's when I was 8 years old and fishing for crappie on Cypress Bay (Kentucky Lake) with my father. We use the KY LAKE CRAPPIE rigs. They consisted of two hooks with the weight 1/4 lb on the rig. You could buy three pre-tied rigs and the lines were wrapped around a long cardboard tube and sold as a package. We went though a lot of these as we fished over stumps and brush along the banks.

Doug also talked about matching the size of the jig head weight to the type of bobber to balance the two together. When a crappie ***** in the jig into it's mouth by flaring it's gill covers and inhaling water with a vacuum effect the weight on the bobber is relieved and the bobber will pop up higher in the water and some times lay over flat. Set the hook quickly when this happens. Crappie don't nibble on the baits like bluegills. They **** it into their mouth with the water and then if they don't like the feel, smell or sensation of the bait they will spit it out fast. You have to be quick and watch the line and bobber to see when they have the bait in their mouth. I don't jerk the hell out of the rod when I get a bite and I use a Richard Williams 7'6" crappie rod that has a lot of give to it. So when I do set the hook the rod absorbs a lot of the pull and doesn't pull the jig hook out of the crappie's mouth. Now if the hook gets in the upper lip area of the crappie mouth it will be harder to get the point of the hook into that area and it pays to have a very sharp hook(s). I use a diamond impregnated electronic hook sharpener to sharpen my hooks during the winter months and get them ready for spring fishing. If your hooks get rusted then it will pay to sharpen them back up and protect them from moisture. Especially on your expensive crank bait hooks. Doug suggested taking the back hooks off a crank bait and replacing them with red treble hooks. Red color is caused by red wave length of light reflecting of the red hooks surface. Other wave lengths of light waves are absorbed and not reflected so you only see the red wave lengths. Red waves are have longer wave lengths than Blue light. Shorter blue wave are absorbed by the water more and thus the red light is the last to be absorbed in the deeper waters. I think I got that right. Don't quote me on this. Look up the wave lengths of the different light colors and double check this. I don't use red hooks. I use the gold Aberdeen type wire hooks in a larger size. I wish that someone would make a larger sized thin wire crappie hook and add a smaller jig head to it so that you get a much slower rate of fall when the jig sinks into the water. A slow fall will get more bites. But you have to have the patience and watch the high colored fishing line carefully to detect the bites. The line may not be as tight and will not transfer the vibrations of the bite as well as when you have a very tight line from the jig to the tip of the rod. I hold onto the line with my fingers to help detect light bites. The bits are all the same from the crappie's aspect. They always **** the bait into the mouth the same way. But the length of the line out, the diameter and type of line, and the amount of sag in the line between where the line enters the water and the tip of the rod will alter the feel of the bite for the fisherman. So I try to keep the line tight as I can in order to better see the bite on the line and also feel the bite with my hands on the sensitive graphite rod. Cork handles may be pretty when they are clean but maybe they also help the feel on the rod with your hands. Cork Vs. the foam rubber handles could make a difference in how the bite vibrations are transferred from the bait, up the line to the rod and into your hand/fingers.

Doug talked for two hours and didn't stop for a break until about 2/3 rd though his presentation and I didn't see any one complaining. Every one seemed to have a good time.

See you next week.

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I think that Doug Sikora's fishing partner will be the next guest speaker. He another crappie tournament guy and fishes in the Indiana Slab Master's Tournament during the 2012 classic and had Doug as hit fishing partner. But you can call the USI outreach office and make sure who the next speaker will be. I'm just guessing based on the old proposed schedule of speakers. The first guy bailed so the 2nd guy on the list was the first speaker. And the the third guy in the list was the second speaker. So I figure that the forth guy on the list will be the 3rd speaker. But I could be wrong as I'm just guessing based on what has happened so far. Maybe the 1st guy who was scheduled and bailed due to an injury will be able to speak at the last class? That would be nice if he could make up his missing his scheduled class. Hope he is recovering from his injury.

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I just reviewed the Precision Trolling Ap and found that the data has to be purchased. They have a lot of different companies baits in the data base. For instance the Bandit Baits are categorized as the Bandit 100, Bandit 200, Bandit 300 and then Bandit 400 and so on. Each bait costs 1.99 to purchase Now if you are buying all the data for all the different types of bandit baits it will add up. And if you buy the other data for the other lure companies and all their various models it will become very costly. I would not to that myself. I already purchased the Precision Trolling Bible for myself and it contains the dive curves for a lot of the different bait companies and a lot of their baits. The dive tables or curves have been copied by various people and were shown on the www.crappie.com forums years ago. I paid for mine. Other's are coping them off the web anywhere they can find the.

Now the guy that developed these dive curves for the various baits had to pay a scuba diver to dive down and watch each bait pass by and then record the dept and then the guys in the boat documented the amount of line out back behind the boat when the lure depth was recorded. Now as a former scuba diver I know how much work that would entail to do all that work and to collect all that data on the various crank baits from all the various companies. That's very time consuming. And it costs a lot to get the scuba tanks certified and tested and then to refill the air tanks for each dive. The scuba equipment is not cheap and it cost's can go into the Thousands of dollars for all the equipment. Tanks, regulators, BC, Depth Gages and tank pressure gages, Masks, Fins and Snorkles, Wet Suit, Hoodie and gloves, Safety Knife and booties. The training to become a certified PADI diver cost money as well and take a few weeks of time to get the training. And then you have to stay in great shape in order to be professional diver. You never know when the regulator might fail or the mask might get kicked off by our partner and you have to know how to react to this hazardous situation. Like when your partner who's diving with you in the murky ocean at depths of 85 ft suddenly runs out of air and tries to race to the surface so he can breath. Endangering his life. You have to react and stop him from ascending too fast and get him to buddy breath off your regulator. Some guys carry two regulators on their tanks with extra hose to do this in case of an emergency. Or in case your main regulator breaks you will have a spare to breath with. So I didn't mind paying for the book. I got my copy at Gander Mountain in Evansville, IN. I have two "trolling Bible" like books and the other one talks about adding different weights to the crank baits to get them deeper. You can also use a down rigger which are not cheap to get the crank baits down to various depths. That might be easier to use out at Bluegrass as the baits won't have to be 200 ft back behind your boat to get down to 20 ft depths. They can be right under the boat and only a few yards behind the weight that's connected to the downrigger thing. That way when your are following a 12 ft contour line using the Lake Master map of Bluegrass Pit and your Humminbird 898C SI sonar's screen map you can maneuver the boat faster and keep the baits out of the shallower waters where the submerging vegetation (Milfoil) grows. I don't like getting the crank baits into the weeds as the treble hooks get fouled on the weed and then won't run true or dive as deep. There are some areas on Bluegrass that have flats full of milfoil grass growing in water up to 7 ft deep. Then the milfoil stops growing around 8 ft to 9 ft deep. So there is a real edge created at this point. But the edge is not straight. Its goes out more from the shoreline and then in other areas it's cuts back into the shoreline. So the edge is irregular in shape as it follows the irregular depth on this man made lake. I found this out the very first time I left the South Ramp at Bluegrass Pit and cross over to the East Side of the Pit before going North. My depth finder was showing the depth come up to 2ft and then dropping back down to 15 ft several times in a rows. And I was staying the same distance from the Eastern shoreline. I discovered the varying topography on the lake bottom that was created by the mining company when the worked this strip mine back in the 1970s. I saw a google earth map from that time period that showed the pit without any water in it yet. That was an eye opener for me. Have any of you guys noticed this on Bluegrass on the East side of the pit near the older main concrete launch ramp? The area before you get to the H part of the Pit. IE The area south of the H and on the Eastern Bank. Work that area and see if you catch any fish on those drop off or up on the grass when it's a cloudy day or in the evening hours. I once caught 40 something small crappie in that area right at dusk. It was the fastest crappie action that I've ever hard. One of those day when they practically jumped in my boat. I have a picture of them in the bottom of my boat which I took right before releasing them back to the water all alive. They filled up my small live well and I had to keep fresh water running into the live well to keep them alive and feisty. It was as much fun as a fisherman could have. I don't have the picture on my hard dive on this computer as I lost the data when I had to reinstall Windows 10 the second time. I had to reformat the hard drive and then recover the windows 7 program that I had stored on DVD when I got this computer brand new. Then I had to install Windows 10 again. I found out later that my video card was the culprit and it was over heating and causing my computer CPU to crash. I replace the video card with another older one and the computer was taken to the computer shop and some new bigger cooling fans were added to the case. Now it works good again. But I lost some of the photos on the hard drive. I have them backup on on one of my two other external hard drives but it's a pain to get them off those external hard drive and back into my Asus Desktop's computer's hard drive again. If it was easy then everyone would be able to do it. Ha Ha. Some day I'll get that done and post the picture in here for you all to see. Now they were only about 9" to 10" long but they were a ball to catch. I normally catch and release these fish after I'm done fishing the spot. I wait until I'm away from the spot where they are biting good before I throw them back into the water. I fear that if I release them back into the water right away that they will spoke the other crappie and the bite will stop. So I don't release them right away. I normally only keep the limit in my live well and then take them home to clean and eat them. I love crappie fillets. Which is why I fish for crappie out there. Most people frown on you when you tell them you like to eat Large Mouth Bass. You get some disapproving expressions from other people when you tell them that you eat LM bass for dinner. But I use to do that. I use to fish for LM bass at KY lake in the late 1950's when I was just 8 years old and we caught and filleted a lot of LM bass as well as Bluegills, Crappie, Catfish, and Sauger each year when we (dad and I) went down to rent a boat and cabin on KY lake in the Spring and fall. Dad fished KY lake with his friend right when it first open and he has some great pictures of huge stringer of LM bass that they caught back in the 1940's.