Anyone pulling cranks at Patoka lake?

[Moveon]

I'm curious if anyone else is trying to pull crank baits at Patoka lake. I've done this one time and caught three nice crappie in the Lick Fork Area.

I had a friend call me yesterday and said he was having a hard time finding any fish except for those little stripers.

He's not been fishing the last three months and now he can't locate the crappie in the normal summer places. He can't even find them on his 1198 Humminbird SI unit either. He can find the deep brush piles but he's not seeing fish in them.

I suggested that maybe the fish are out suspended along the breaks or channel in areas that In-Fisherman Crappie Wisdom Book calls "Confined Open Water". When they are out in open water chasing bait fish they can be hard tof ind and hard to catch. But that's where I think that they are. Which is why I'm getting into trolling crank baits for them. I've caught a lot of largemouth black bass out over 50 ft deep water about 10 to 20 ft down. I was really surprised to find that the bass were suspending out over the deep water basins. But I've only caught a few crappie duing this. I've yet to find the right depth, speed and color lure to catch the crappie in big numbers.

Now this spring I did manage to find some nice big females that were getting ready to spawn. They were out over open water suspended and not far from a spawning shelf of water that was about 7 ft deep at the end of the submergent weeds. The lake's color is green due to a lot of algae or other micro-organisms in the water. These old coal mines strip pits are very deep and have filled in with water. They are fully of minerals and have a very high (extreme) conductivity which indicates that there are a lot of Ion's in the water that can carry an electrical current. This is probably due to all the minerals that were in the ground that was disturbed in order to get the coal out. This high conductivity makes it hard for IDEM Fishery people doing their surveys with electric shock boats.

Any way I'm still trying to figure out where the crappie are. I know that a lot of people catch them down south while trolling crank baits.

I'm thinking about buying and installing a "Happy Troller" plate on my motor to help me slow down while trolling. It's either that or buy a Minn-Kota Terrova with the I Pilot in it. It's either that or a new hand gun or a new AR 15 type hunting rifle. Those three things are on my wish list right now. I'll probably just get the $100 happy troller and just continue to use my current Minn-Kota trolling motor and my older hunting rifle. I'm not even sure what type of handgun I would get if I did actually get one. Some thing that's not too expensive to shoot and that had ammo available for it now. Ammo supplies are getting better but not many stores have any 22 long rifle shells in stock. I read where the number of women buying or getting carry permits in Vanderburgh County has nearly doubled this year. I guess a lot more women bought 22 cal hand guns to carry and they increased the number of people buying 22 ammo. No matter why all I know is that there is still a shortage of 22 ammo at the Evansville Gander Mountain Store last Saturday afternoon.

I need to change out the spark plugs on my motor if I keep slow trolling as carbon must be building up on the ends of the plugs. I'm using stabil and sea foam in the gas to help burn it cleaner and keep the engine free of extra carbon deposits. That's helping but I still can't go slow enough without the motor stopping. I figure a little hotter (shorter white part of the plug -insulator) might help keep the engine running better at very slow speeds.

I spend this morning organizing the boat and tackle boxes. I've got three soft tackle boxes of crank baits that I went though and organized some what. All the shallow runners in one box and all the medium depth runners in another box. I've got 14 plastic storage boxes of crank baits with some compartments filled with two or even three crank baits.

Some of the crank baits needs some work. I need to install a new treble hook in a few of them and paint three or four of the old bomber balsa wood crank baits. Dad must have removed the paint off them and never got around to repainting them. I do remember seeing him painting some crank baits but he didn't do a very good job compared to todays painters. Today you can use a air gun to spray paint these baits and get a better finish on them vs using a brush. Dad was never very artistic. He should have talked my mom into painting them for him. She's very handy with a paint brush and did a lot of craft work. She is the artist in our family. Me, I just want to catch some fish.

This week will be cooler and only getting up into the 80's and not as humid. The fish don't really care about the Air temperature as they can just go shallow or deep and adjust to the water temp and amount of sunlight.

Winds were out of the North and East this past two days and the lake conditions will be different than when the winds come out of the South.

[raporter]

It is a strange year. Been hitting some deep brush lately with little results.
Best results have come near trees(Not necessarily in the trees)in the 20'+ range. Been casting the jig and letting it go to the bottom then VERY slowly steadily retrieving it. Some are hitting it hard and some are just sucking it in and the line gets heavy.
Also been getting some nice channels doing this.
Another thing that is working is vertical jigging when I see them on the locator.

[Moveon]

It is a strange year. Been hitting some deep brush lately with little results.
Best results have come near trees(Not necessarily in the trees)in the 20'+ range. Been casting the jig and letting it go to the bottom then VERY slowly steadily retrieving it. Some are hitting it hard and some are just sucking it in and the line gets heavy.
Also been getting some nice channels doing this.
Another thing that is working is vertical jigging when I see them on the locator.

My good friend Larry said that he's having no luck in the deep brush piles this week. He's been working the last thee months and just didn't have time to fish every day like he normally did since he retired. But he's laid off right now and back out on Patoka every day.

You probably see him more often than I do these days and you are on the lake more than me.

There is a tread going on at crappie.com INDIANA Forum that pertains to trolling crank baits. There is a guy who goes by Crevan over there that trolls cranks a lot. And there is another long thread in the Mississippie State Forum that talks about pulling cranks. I'ts got over 101 posts on it about pulling crank baits.

If I lived up by Patoka Lake I'd be fishing it a lot more often. Thanks for the feedback. If I hear any good news from Larry I'll pass it on to this forum.

[Moveon]

First off I'd like to say ... Don't go fishing at Bluegrass Pit on a Sunday when the weather is nice as you will have to compete with 30 other boats and fisherman not to mention all the kayakers plowing though the fishing grounds.

I had two women in kayaks try to cut though my fishing area right when I was catching my best bass of the day. I had already caught two nice 3 lb bass on this flat and one nice 10" big crappie and had been trolling the area. I stopped to cast a spinner bait on a flat that reached out from the shoreline and was making casts towards the shallows when out of the right corner of my eye I see two woman in Kayaks approaching along the shoreline. One said to me, "We will only be a minute and indicated that she intended to row right through where I was fishing. I politely asked her if she could go around me and not go though the fishing area. And then explained the rules of fishing etiquette to her. She complied and hopefully I helped her avoid any future confrontations with fishermen. I explained to her that I was catching fish at the time and she would disturb the fishing grounds if she and her companion rowed though these shallow flats. I'm not sure she really understood the concept but she did comply with my request to row around my boat and use the deeper water outside where I was fishing. We exchanged a few words about how nice the day was and they moved on. She now knows that it's not polite to cut between a fishing boat and the shore line and that will really irritate a lot of fisherman. I doubt that anyone had ever taught her this unspoken rules that exits between most fisherman. I try to practice this rule too. But there are times when a lake is so crowded that it's hard to not cut between someone and the bank. Especially when they anchor 150 ft away from a shallow point that extends out into the lake for 100 ft. One guy was doing this last Sunday and one minute he was catching out toward deeper water and then the next he was catching back into the shallow water. He was at least 300 ft out from the point's land. And he was at the Mouth of the "H". The opening to the "H" at bluegrass is not that wide to begin with. And when there are two boats on each point at the Mouth of the "H" it's nearly impossible to go into the "H" without getting close to one of those two boats. By close I mean within about 100 ft. Note: these new rods and new ultra precision reels help guys make a lot longer casts these days as compared to the older rod and reels of yesteryears. Note: I'm currently reading "lucas on Bass" which was written in the 1940's when using SILK line was in fashion. Today's braided fire line is a lot different than those older fishing lines that they used back in the 1940 and 1960's. Todays modern Shimano or Ambassador Reels can cast a lot father than those older Heddon and Shakesphere reels.

It was impossible to troll on Sunday as every time I got a good line going a boat would move out into my path andI had to go around. I used the Side planer boat Sunday for the second time and got the tattle flag to work. The trouble was I didn't catch but 4 fish on it and the biggest one was the 10" crappie which made the flag go down ok. I caught a small bluegill on the crank bait's trailer jig and the crappie bit on the trailer jig as well.

I changed out the crank bait for a different colored one and then at the end of the day tried a third different colored crank bait.

I tried all depths using a Bandit 200 and a Bandit 300. I used anywhere from 25 ft of line out to 150 ft of line out and go no bites. I normally try fishing shallow crank baits first and then gradually let out more and more line until I find the fish.

I updated the Software on my Humminbird 898 unit and I think its' messed up the 2 D Sonar. I was not getting the fish symbols with the depth readings at all until I fiddled with the sonar settings. And the sonar is cluttered a lot until I turned off the Noise Filter all together. I had that set on Low by default. After I turned off the Noise Filter I started seeing the Fish symbols again. And I had the fish ID turned on with the fish Sensitivity turned all the way up to 10 and all the way down to 1. Worked best at 10.

Once I got the fish symbols and the fish depths I could see that most all the fish were at the surface from 7 ft down to 15 ft.

The water below 20 ft shows all kinds of debris in the water column. The water from the surface was clear down to about 20 ft with only a few fish symbols or schools of fish or bait fish. But below 20ft to the bottom there was a lot of cloudiness on the screen. Maybe it's air bubbles from all the **** speed boats. I saw a lot of boats going way over the idle speed limit. At idel speed you don't throw a wake behind your boat or see white water at the bow of the boat.

IDNR was on patrol for a couple of mintues at Bluegrass Pit. But that Green Uniform can be seen from a mile away. If they want to catch the speeders they need to blend in more. Right after IDNR left the water and pulled out their boat the other boats seems to go even faster. I could have easily filmed at least six or seven differnet boats going over the speed limit big time. Speeds are creeping up faster and faster.

Idle speed on my 35 hp Motor and 16 ft john boat is about 1.5 to 1.8 mph. I'd estimate that some of the boats that I saw were going at least 8 mph or maybe 1. Most were in the 5 to 6 mph ranges. Slow but not idle speed. Ok enough said. I'll let the IDNR CO's handle this and just hope that they don't make us go back to using trolling motors only like they did when Bluegrass first opened. My main fear is that they will get piss at the boaters if we all don't obey the rules and then no one will be allowed to use a gas motor on Bluegrass Pit. Now I see why they had that rule in the first place. How do one enforce a idle speed only when they can't really say what speed that is? Eash boat will idle differently and who's really to say if the boat driver has the throttle down all the way or had it inched up a little bit and was calling that idle speed? The CO has never stopped me yet. But I did see him checking other boats for fishing license and life jackets. Perhaps he's not so concerned with our speed. But is more concerned with our safety and our having a fishing license and not catching too many fish. I didn't see the CO pull anyone over for speeding Sunday. But I really was not watching him that closely as I was trying to fish.

When I used the side planer board I have to keep an eye on the tattle flag at all times and that requires me to turn back to see it. When I just fish with single pole in a rod holder I can see the poll bending in the rear view mirror. So I prefer that method better than using the side planer board. I caught three small stripers in the "H" section just trolling a small bandit 300 behind the boat about 30 ft out. I'm surprised that fish will stike a lure that's in the prop's wash. But they do not seem to care. Perhaps the bigger fish use the boat presence to help them attack the smaller bait fish. Perhaps the boat's prop kills a few bait fish when you run through a school of shad at the surface and the bigger fish know this and follow our boats. Sharks are known to follow fishing boats. One bull shark was radio tagged and was found to follow a fishing boat using radio telemetry tracking. I guess the shark knew that the fishing boat would put some bait fish out for him to steal. . All I know is that I caught some small stripers right behind the boat pulling some crank baits.


I did end up catching three nice LM bass, one 10" long White Crappie, One 9" long bluegill and three small stripers. By small I mean about 5" long or less. The **** crank bait was almost as big as those fish. I was going to keep them for bait. I was going to cut them up and use them in a crawfish trap but decided that it was too much trouble and so I let them go at the end of the day. I also didn't take any pictures at all. Although I had my DSLR camera and my Garmin Montana 605T with me in the boat. Too much trouble to get the camera out with fish slime on my hands. I needed another person in the boat with me to take the pictures who had clean hands. I don't like getting my new camera all dirty with fish slime and didn't want to take the time to get the hand soap out to wash my hands before taking a pictures. Besides I have plenty of pictures of these type of LM Bass and Crappie that I've caught at Bluegrass in the past.

Bottom line is that I didn't really enjoy the day as it was way too crowded. It was still pretty crowded when I left around 5 pm as one truck and boat trailer waited until I moved my truck so that he could find a parking spot. He pulled into my parking space right after I vacated it to go get my boat and leave.

The weather was great. It was a little bit windy but not too bad. Water temp was warm according to a guy who went for a swim and was coming back with his kayak when I got there that morning. He was wearing a wet suit and carrying his kayak to his car. That was at the North End of Bluegrass which I checked out before launching at the South End. BTW the North End parking lot had about 6 or 7 boat trailers in it's parking lot Sunday Morning.

The skies were clear to partly cloudy and it didn't rain at all Sunday. Winds were out of the NW most of the day. Typical bluebird sky after a frontal system passed though this week. High Pressure must have been dominating the area Sunday. So fishing was tough. But I did have a good time catching the bass. I caught all three of the bass on a ultra light outfit and had to play them for a while before I could net them. Using 6 lb test line and a limber UL Slow Action St Croix rod made it fun. Just cast out a small spinner bait and real it in really slow over the top of the dark green fern like grass. That stuff is where the fish are located. I don't know which type of grass that is but I know it when I see it on my baits.

I also found that trolling cranks at Bluegrass catches a lot more weeds if you don't stay in the 10 ft deep or deeper water. Anytime I got into the 8 ft and 7 ft depths I would get a bunch of weeds on my treble hooks. This make the crank bait run ineffectively.

[Moveon]

The last time I went out and trolled crank baits I caught 3 nice crappie and a nice big Bluegills. It was a pretty good trip for trolling cranks. All were caught in the first hour or two of fishing. After that things slowed down.

I caught all the crappie on the trailer jigs that I attacked to the back treble hook on the Bandits.

I took these pictures with the new Garmin Montana 650T GPS unit which has a 4 megapixel camera built into it. It's perfect for posting pictures on this web site and the internet. All I have to do is plug the Montana into a mini usb port cord that has a regular USB plug on the other end. And the Garmin Montana hooks up to my computer just like an external hard drive. Works great and it's fast too. These are pictures straight off the camera with no photo shopping done to them. I didn't have to resize them to get them to post in fishin.com.

[raporter]

Hit the lake twice this week. Best results was trolling jigs 1 to 1.2 MPH. Nibbles greatly enhanced the catch.

[Moveon]

Hit the lake twice this week. Best results was trolling jigs 1 to 1.2 MPH. Nibbles greatly enhanced the catch.

I've not been up to Patoka much this year, but sure wish that I would get motivated to get myself up there. I'm getting reports from Larry that he's having a hard time finding the big crappie after being off the lake for three months. He went back to work for a few months after retiring.

Are you catching the crappie deep still? We normally catch them off deep brush piles but Larry said he was not finding the fish in the deep brush piles this summer for some reason.

I'm finding my crappie near the submergent vegetation. Leafy Pond Weed or Milfoil is prevalent in Bluegrass Pit and the other old coal mine strip pits down here in Warrick County, IN.

I finally got the Eazy Troller Plate installed and used it for the first time. It's really slows my boat down too much. I was only going 0.5 mph with the plate in the down trolling position. I had to increase the rpm's to get going faster and the boat motor makes too much noise. I'm planning on cutting a new hole position so that the plate will only go down to 45 degrees. I can still lower the plate all the way down if I need to go very slow. But I want to go at about 1.0 to 1.5 mph at idle speed. I'm just trying to figure out a way to make the notch in the aluminum look as good and clean at the other factory cut notches. They look like they were cut out with a water jet and computer controlled or something. Very clean cut with precision and accuracy. They really should make a three position on these trolling plates at the factory. But I can figure something out sooner or later.

I checked the rectifier and it's faulty so I got a new one and plan on installing that myself. I have a new Clamp Amp meter to use to check the amp flowing out of it at full throttle to see if I'm charging the battery up while running the engine. My Optima Starting Battery is always in need of charging and it take a couple of hours to charge it back up to full. So I figured I'd check the rectifier and sure enough it had some bad diodes and was not charging my battery. Heck I was trolling all day long at idle speed and you would think that it would put some juice back into my Optima Battery after running the engine for two hours or more. But the thing only puts out about 4 amps at full throttle so maybe just idling around does not generate enough amps to charge the battery back up. I know it takes a lot of juice to start the motor up. And I don't check the battery every trip out. Maybe every 4th or 5 th trip. The motor always fires right up when I try to start it.















I've been working on my old truck trying to get it fixed up to be more dependable. I had the values adjusted for the first time since 1986 when I bought the thing. It sounds a lot quieter now. And then I had a leaking valve cover gasket repaired. So I'm hoping I don't keep losing oil out the valve cover. It was getting on the engine and I feared the engine would catch on fire. So I cleaned the oil up with some degreaser. It's smelling much better now. LOL The guy even adjusted the carburetor for me at no extra charge. I'm hoping that all he did was increase the idle speed needle as I can always turn that back down if I need to. If he adjusted anything else I may not be able to return the settings back to where they were. The truck starts fine when it's warm but it's a bear to start when it get's really cold. And it's harder to start the colder it gets. I've been looking for a new truck and have my eye on a few right now. The problem is they want TOO MUCH MONEY for the things. Some cost almost as much as my house when I got it back in 1987. Some of the new Nissan 4x4's cost around $34,000 and that's way out of my budget for now.

I also found out that I have a bad tire. I had a friend who was following behind my truck tell me that my right rear tire was wobbling. I took it into Pep Boys to get the oil changed and had them look at the truck's tire. They said the Tire was bad. It's a pretty new tire. I had replace all four tires after finally getting all 4 ball joints replaces. The one ball joint literally fell apart in the shop after they took it off as it was worn so bad.

So I'm slowly getting the truck back into shape where I can trust it on a longer trip to Patoka and Back.

I saw a new GMC or is it a Chevy Colorado Truck. It's a 2012 model and king cab with extra room in the back. I wouldn't want to sit back there for more than two minutes though. Looks like that space is better suited for a suit case or small tool box than a human. They only want about 19,000 for it.

And I found a nice 2010 Toyota Tacoma for sale just last night. But they want about 19,000 for it but it's a automatic and I wanted a manual transmission. I like to shift gears. But it's loaded and very nice. I could see myself driving in that Toyota Truck. It's PURTY too. I have a sneaky suspension that that one won't stay on the lot very long. I wanted to order a new Toyota and make it mine but this is the wrong time of the year to do that according to the salesman. But he was a pre-owned salesman and perhaps he just wanted to sell me a used car instead of a new one.

[raporter]

Yep, still catching them deep while jigging. Doing some vertical jigging too. Pulling jigs with nibbles has been the ticket the last few times out. Strange year.

[GeoFisher]

The last time I went out and trolled crank baits I caught 3 nice crappie and a nice big Bluegills. It was a pretty good trip for trolling cranks. All were caught in the first hour or two of fishing. After that things slowed down.

I caught all the crappie on the trailer jigs that I attacked to the back treble hook on the Bandits.

I took these pictures with the new Garmin Montana 650T GPS unit which has a 4 megapixel camera built into it. It's perfect for posting pictures on this web site and the internet. All I have to do is plug the Montana into a mini usb port cord that has a regular USB plug on the other end. And the Garmin Montana hooks up to my computer just like an external hard drive. Works great and it's fast too. These are pictures straight off the camera with no photo shopping done to them. I didn't have to resize them to get them to post in fishin.com.

Man, those are nice........

I really need to try crappie at Patoka sometime.....

[Moveon]

Man, those are nice........

I really need to try crappie at Patoka sometime.....

Some time the crappie are up in the weeds in the shallow flats. Troling though that stuff with a crank bait can be tough. Even if the weeds are below the surface by a couple of feet there are always some free weeds floating on the surface.

I spend more time pulling weeds off the crank baits than I do fish. Hey, That's fishing though.

I've got three soft bags now (each with 4 of the 7250 Plano Plastic Boxes full of crank baits. About 1/2 of them are new Bandit Crank Baits. The rest I got from my late father's collection of crank baits that we used for 30 years down at KY lake.

I remember him talking about going down to KY lake in late Oct or Nov and walking the banks of the islands and finding all kinds of baits hung up in the buck bush. When the water's up in the spring people lose all kinds of baits in the buck brush. Back in the 1950's the buck brush was thick as tourist in Paris in the summer time. But when the corps drop the water level those baits are hanging on the buck brush branches which are not high and dry. It's like picking Christmas tree ornaments off the Christmas tree on Christmas Eve.

Dad use to take those old crank baits back home and repaint them and replace the hooks if needed. I found some nice arrow heads one time when I went there with him in the fall. There was a old fort on the bluff at the mouth of the bay where we used to fish. And I heard that some people would find civil war mini balls at times. I think that was Ft Danielson. It was at the mouth of Cypress Bay right on the KY/TN line.

[Moveon]

I snagged five good slab crappies yesterday while trolling crank baits at Bluegrass F&W Area lakes.

They were all about 17 ft to 18 ft deep over 18 to 26 ft of water.

I used my Humminbird 898 SI unit and a Lake Master digital map to troll the 22 ft contour line plus or minus 2 ft. When I set up the Lake master card to show this area in green on my map it's easy to keep the map's boat icon in the green area to stay at the right depth.

Some of the fish were caught in a inside bend in the shoreline. Others were caught off points along the shoreline.

All were caught in the area called "Confined Open Water" as described by the In Fishermen Book Crappie Wisdom.

All Five crappie were over 10" lone and two were about 11" and 12" long. All were healthy fish. Their stomachs were full of shad. None of these fish had any visible egg sacks. I've caught crappie in Nov and Dec that had egg sacks in them. But those eggs don't really fully develop until April of the next year.