Why am I writing about crappie fishing right in the middle of hunting season you ask? Because we live in some primo country.
There is so much going on the last few months on into the fall that I need to write a daily article to keep up.
A couple of weeks ago on Tuesday we hiked up to flyfish a high mountain stream, the next day we drifted the SF of the Snake River and then next day we fished a pond.
Some were over 11 inches.
I drove home Thursday night and then got the urge to run do some crappie fishing on Friday. The fishing was pretty good so Saturday morning I had to get up and fillet a half cooler of fish and then had to go dove hunting that afternoon.
See what I mean? I could write a daily article on what’s going on in the Idaho outdoors right now. I wanted to be up archery elk & deer hunting right now as we speak….
Type but my daughter was due on 9/16 so literally any hour a new fishing buddy is going to be entering the world. She’s going to be a spoiled little princess. How old does she have to be before I buy her a fishing rod? Bear in mind my grandson got his first BB gun when he was 6 months old.
So, before I get into strictly a stretch of hunting articles, I want to write one last Crappie Fishing article. I didn’t really think that I would do any good but I’d met the Rapala crew at the big iCAST show down in Orlando the middle of July and they’d sent me a few fillet knives to test. I’d told them if I received them right away, I might could get in one last trip and get to test them out or else it’d be next Spring.
Fell in love with the cordless fillet knife. They’d really be nice if you’re spending a few days on the lake.
Well, they were a little late arriving but Friday I got the itch to do one last trip, so I did.
For the last 15-20 years I usually do good on crappie until June 10 and then it dies down to zilch. But for whatever reason, the last 6-7 years I keep catching crappie until I knock off the first of September to archery hunt. But I’ve never caught them this late in the year.
I got to the lake and was unloading the Black Pearly slightly after mid-afternoon. Marshall Williamson and his wife were camping nearby and he came down to help me unload her. I told him if he wanted to he could jump in so he did.
He told me a couple of guys had just left and they’d been down fishing where I was going to head and hadn’t caught a thing.
He pointed to a spot about a mile off and said that they had really racked up there. It was an old spot of mine but I haven’t done any good there the last 3-years so I had quit hitting it.
Even though I didn’t catch as many as normal, we caught some big ones.
But at his suggestion we zipped over to my old hot spot and boy am I glad that we did. We didn’t catch the big volumes that I normally do, we only kept 48 but nearly every one of them were 10-11 inches and one or two were pushing 11 ½. Wow! That’s the biggest stringer of crappie I’ve caught in 25 years here.
The only change that I made was I was using some different lures. I don’t know if that is what did it or some big ones had just moved in. I don’t know.
I’d met the Z-Man crew at Orlando as well and they had sent me some jig heads and plastics to try.
The plastics are about 3/8-inches smaller than I normally use and their jig heads have the shape as a marshmallow. Anyway, they worked.
If you go out, as usual for crappie, they were hitting really light. If one hits lift your rod tip and keep reeling. If you set the hook like you do on a black bass, you’ll rip their lips off and lose them. There’s a reason that they call them paper mouths.
You can lift them into the boat but I net all of mine so I don’t lose them, and especially the bigger heavier ones. So, I recommend you net them but if you’re going to boat them without netting them do it in one smooth fluid motion. If you boat them awkwardly, you’ll lose half of them and even more so on the big ones.
Well unfortunately that pesky sun started dropping over the horizon so we had to call it a day. But we’d had a great afternoon fishing. We loaded the Black Pearl and I bid Marshall good bye and off I went.
My buddy Larry has been telling me that I needed to get a cordless fillet knife. It sounded like a good idea and would probably end up preventing me from getting shocked while filleting my fish with an electric knife while standing in a puddle.
I got the fish filleted, Katy fried up some for us for lunch and then I took off dove hunting. It’s tough being the man of the house and having to always fish & hunt to provide food for the family.
And the story now ends where it begun. It’s time to run to the hospital and get ready to greet my new granddaughter who has an ETA of 6:30 tonight (Give or take 6-12 hours)!
Tom Claycomb is a hunting enthusiast and writes a bi-monthly column for Great Basin Sun.