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.