Patoka temps

[Spider04]

Just as a follow up I did get a chance to hit Patoka on Saturday and fished up the river. Found water temps as high as 70 degrees although most were around 68. Did not find any fish in the highest water temp though which was suprising. Did better on wind blown points with muddier water. Most of main lake was in the lower to mid 60's. While this represents the water temps, my personal skin temp was well over 100.......it got god awful hot out there in the afternoon! No cloud cover and high 80's temps. Just not used to it yet.

[Moose1am]

[font size="1" color="#FF0000"]LAST EDITED ON Apr-20-06 AT 03:53AM (EST)[/font][p]It's hard to find any shade up at Patoka. It's not like KY lake where you can find some shady trees overhanging the water in some spots.

Did you run into any submerged tree tops? I got an email from a friend that fishs Patoka Lake all the time and he went up river and said the tree tops were just under the water when the lake is at this level 538ft. We went up to Kings Bridge last spring when the water was only at 533ft and you could see the trees well enough to find the old river channel and stay in the channel. But without any trees to see it would be hard to figure out where the river channel is. That channel is only about 20ft wide in some spots. It's easy to get out of the channel and if the water or lake is down to 532ft you can run into some huge stumps or get stuck on a mud flat. DNR did their survey at Patoka and they posted the Map Coordinates of the fish traps. I took those map coordinates and plotted them on my FHS digital map of Patoka and most of them were upriver from Kings Bridge. But there are plenty of big crappie downstream from Kings and dumpling creek and even walls ramp. I'll bet that the crappie are spawning from Osborn ramp all the way up river to well above kings bridge. My buddie said they caught some nice fish up that way this last weekend. Saturday and Sunday. CrappieUSA had the Patoka Lake Tournament last Saturday and they weighed in some 2# plus fish Saturday.

I heard that it was really crowded Saturday too.

Regards,

Moose1am

[Spider04]

Last Saturday was really crowded. Banks were getting beaten up good. A lot of crappie fishermen also; as you stated from Osborn on further north.
There were submerged trees that we had to watch out for. Glad you passed on the water levels to watch out for this. Will use them in the future.
Still learning Patoka but enjoyed my experience out there last Saturday. Was the first time I had been up the river. Most of my prior experience was around Painter Creek, and that wasn't much. Patoka on paper is an attractive lake. I can't wait to get more time on it.

[indylux]

Spider,

I'm heading down to Patoka next weekend and am heading up the river for the first time myself. Did you have any difficulty navigating?

[Spider04]

Indylux-
My partner guided us through with no issues, but he has been up river before. I wish I could give you more to work with. Someone else on the board might be able to offer more help. Hope you have a good trip.

[WMAMOS]

Isn't there a ramp up the river that would cut down on the ride?

[Moose1am]

Kings Brige area has a gravel launch ramp. I have never seen this but have read about it. You have to go the back roads to get to this launch ramp though.

Upriver from Walls you have to really watch out for submerged trees right now.

My friend emailed me and told me it was hazardous and he fishes this area all the time as he has a cabin up at Patoka and is up there fishing almost every weekend from April to Nov. He has been fishing Patoka ever since it opened like me only he fishs it all summer long. I only fish it once or twice a year. I just recently (Last 4 years ) went up river from Osborn ramp to explore the Walls Area. I went up there many years ago and got a speeding ticket after I went from the Brige area on HWY 145 all the way to Walls. As I came around the corner at Walls there was a CO boat on my right parked in that cove and he clocked me with radar going over 10mph. I can't remember how much faster than 10 mph I was suppose to be going. I had barely got my boat's nose on plane. I didn't have any way of knowing how fast I was going as I didn't have gps back then and didn't have a pitot tube on my boat or any speedometer device. I was just tired the trip taking so darn long. I had not been speeding the entire time and had only increase speed as I approached this turn because it looked like the underwater trees were disappearing an I had reached more open water. Not sure if they still sit up there but I would not want to be speeding up there when they are around. In fact it's not safe to go very fast up there IMHO. I have seen one guy going over 40 mph though the area on the right hand side as you go upriver from dumplin creek. This bass boat was going over 40 mph at least and in only 2 ft of water close to the bank. I have seen three huge stumps up there when the water levels were down in 2002 and these stumps were about 4 ft in diameter. If that boat had hit one of them stumps it would have killed everyone on the boat. The guy was huggin the shorelien so maybe he knew about those stumps. They were more out toward the middle of the lake and not close to the shoreline if memory serves me right. The river channel hugs the Western bank and this guy was running on the Eastern bank. Dumpling creek if full of submerged tree and the creek channel hugs the Eastern Bank most of the way back into dumpling creek until it s splits into two bays. Then the creek channel crosses the back of the bay and runs toward the eastern most bay. From there it intersects with a roadway that crossed the bay at one time before it was flooded. There is parts of an old bridge concrete structure on the South side of this road. It's near the Southern Bank of the Eastern bay in the back of dumpling creek. I fished there in early April of 2002 but all the crappie were still staging in 12ft of water out near the mouth of dumplin creek where the River gets close to the North East shoreline. The submerged trees from that point back along the north or east side of the bay is where there are a lot of big crappie during the pre spawn. Can't post pictures in here or I would show you a map of this area that has good detail. I am talking about a topo map that has 5ft contour levels and at times has 2.5 ft contour lines in some places of the lake. This map was made before the lake was built and was done for the
corp of engieers. The map scale is Indiana Plane Map Coordinates not UTM or longitude or Latitude which is why I have not finshed my conversion of these paper maps to digital form. I was planning on make these map where I could use them with OziExplorer and be able to look a the digital map on my computer screen and point to a spot on the screen to get the map coordinates to use with my gps unit. But I have to convert all the Indiana Plane Map Coordiantes to UTM coordinates before I can calibate the map using OziExplorer. Not only that but I scanned these big 19 1/2" by 13 1/3" maps using an 8 1/2" by 11" scanner bed and had to scan each big paper map four times. I have four 1/4 map scans for each paper sheet. And to show all of the Patoka Lake it takes about 20 of the big paper sheets. So I have 20 x 4 scans to work with. And then I screwed up and scanned these maps at 600 dpi which was way too high of a resulution. Each 1/4 scan of a single paper map is over 100 mb in memory size. So I have to use my graphics program and reduce the resolution on 80 differnet files before I can even start the conversion of the map coordinates to UTM. And I am not even sure how to read the Indiana Plane Map Coordinates right now. So this project never did really get going real good. It's at a complete standstill right now. Maybe I will get into this project later when I get the courage to tackle it again. Even if I get it done I won't know how accuate the map calibration will be. I have to use a graphic program also to splice each 1/4 map scan back into one map page. Then I was trying to figure out how to spice the 20 maps into one big lake map. That may not even be feasible.

Bottom line is right now you should be really careful traveling up river from Walls to Kings Bridge or beyound Kings bridge further up river as the channel is hard to find when all the tree tops are under the water. I don't know if there are any tree tops above the water's surface showing the old river channel or not. My sourc of information didn't tell me that. Maybe he will read this and let up know. Larry you reading this mate?

I may be up there soon and find out for myself. I hope to get up there someday and do some fishing before May gets here.

Regards,

Moose1am

[raporter]

>Isn't there a ramp up the
>river that would cut down
>on the ride?

Yes, Kings bridge. Gravel ramp.

[raporter]

Just got in from Walls Ramp area and yep there is 70' water up there.