What a wonderful day today. Hope we have some days in April like today. Minus the 19 degrees at the start!!! Was hard to imagine at 7:30 am it was going to warm up to 60 later in the day!
I thought the fish wouldn't bite early... 19 degrees!! The lake should have been frozen over but we clocked the temp at 42. Boated to Snapp... stopped twice to thaw our faces. I didn't want to fish once we got up there. I can get pumped to fish for trout in 19 degrees but not crappie or any other warm water fish. Just doesn't compute! But fish we did. Caught the first crappie at 7:45 am.
White 1/8th oz jig was my weapon of choice. Bill stuck with his swim baits, mostly a black over white 3 inch swimming minnow. I did throw a pearl 3 inch swimming minnow on a 1/4rd oz head several times and did catch a few but the white jig did the best for me.
Set the boat in 20 feet of water and threw up into 5-9 feet and let it go to the BOTTOM. That's where 100% of the fish were. Had to get there and keep it there. Work it slow and stopped 2-3 times as we retrieved it. At first, the takes were soft, especially the crappie. There was a slight breeze from the north but not enough to affect the line or the feel. Mostly crappie for the first 2 hours. Then the whites started in. Mix in a walleye or two and some small bass and that was our day. The bite slowed mid day. The wind completely stopped about 10 am and picked up about 1 pm but still not much.
We tried several other places up and down the lake. Similar structure- roll offs from flats to channel and a couple of humps Bill and Vince knew about. Oh yea- Vince joined up about 2 pm. We hit one spot where we picked up 5 nice whites in short order plus a beautiful yellow perch Vince caught- he released it before I could get a pic of it. It was really pretty... about 10 inches long.
The whites later in the day were more active and would tap the jig pretty hard. Again, can't stress this enough, the lure had to be on the bottom.
Ended the day with 15 nice crappie from 11 to 14 inches, 20 whites mostly 2+ pounders, one keeper walleye and 3 shorts, 3 big gills. Had a couple keeper blacks but didn't keep them plus several other small blacks.
Bill counted 40+ rigs at the ramp. Never got crowded and everyone was pleasant on the water.
Didn't get any good video... sorry.
Chris Tectrick was fishing close to us most of the day. He has I think 10 crappie and 10 whites. Saw Tim Sainato on the water also. He and another guy had 2 limits of big whites by noon and were working on crappie when we talked to them.
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