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September 27, 2008

Slow Fall Day

Got to spend a few hours this afternoon on Eagle Creek Res. Water temps are down to about 74 degrees and the lake is a foot or two below normal pool. There are tons of little shad everywhere; In the backs of coves, at the mouth of coves, out on the main lake. A fish merely has to swim around and open his mouth and he'll engulf a mouthful of these tasty tidbits. Throw on top of that a cold front with blue skies and north winds and my whine is complete. Threw jigs around a bit for bass and lost 1 good fish, but that was it. Switched to crappie and struggled to find them, also. Managed to catch about 15-18 fish, but they were pretty slow and tight to cover. The wind wouldn't really allow getting out on main lake stuff like I wanted, so I was reserved to coves and steep western banks. Have also received two other reports today from anglers out on Cataract and Raccoon that said the bite sucked for them, too, so at least I wasn't alone. Maybe tomorrow.

One thing I noticed was that the water in the very backs of the creeks are just starting to turn "purple" or wine colored from a diatom bloom. This will only get worse as the water cools over the next week or two. You'll probably start seeing guys talk about the lakes turning over, but that's not what is happening yet. It's algal succession taking place. I've got an entire post on it somewhere back in the archives.

Did get to capture a cool graph pic while I was out there though. This is an old bridge that crosses one of the creeks out in a large cove. This is a pretty good shot of what it looks like when you come across a bridge relatively perpendicular. You can see the creek sliding down under the bridge and then the jump up to the very hard surfaced bridge. Lots of fish suspended in open water around the bridge today also, but no large groups, otherwise I would have stopped and fished. 

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September 25, 2008

Cool UV Data

There is some pretty interesting data concerning UV penetration in water contained in an article about to be published soon. Patterns of Ultraviolet Radiation Exposure in Bluegill Nests over the Course of the Spawning Season deals with UV mortality as it applies to YOY bluegill and the changes in that mortality pattern (and nesting behavior) through the spawning season. The study took place on Lake Giles, a lake with very good base water clarity, often in the 8-10 m range (~30'). There was also some cool bluegill behavioral observations.

  • At the start of the spawning season, the majority of all bluegill nests were located in the first 1.5 meters of depth. This was largely attributed to water temp. The earliest wave of spawners were largely restricted to the warmth of the shallows, and subsequently exposed to the most UV radiation.

  • The next wave of spawners two weeks later spawned around the 4-4.5 meter range with about 75% of the entire group spawning between 3-5 m. Warmer water let fish spawn in deeper water and further from UV penetration.The final group of spawners split depths (bimodal) with about half going shallow and half going deeper.

  • Water temps remained fairly stable and consistent in the first 3.5 meters of depth regardless of wave, temps were just warmer overall as the season progressed over the 4 week period.

  • Approx. 90% of all irradiance (light attenuation at 320 nm - longer wave UVA) was absorbed in the first 1.5 meters of depth. Early in the season (1st spawning wave) the 1% attenuation depth was approx. 2.5 meters. The later weeks (2nd and 3rd waves) had 1% attenuation levels of about 1.5-1.6 meters.

  • From the paper: "In part, this decrease in transparency may reflect increased chlorophyll concentrations associated with the end of the clear water phase (Williamson et al. 2007). A more likely explanation is that transparency declined owing to CDOM (chromorphic dissolved organic matter) inputs from the surrounding watershed, particularly following a heavy rainfall event in early July. Fresh CDOM has high UVR absorbance, which decreases over time owing to photobleaching (Osborn et al. 2001). Because UVR attenuates exponentially with depth, the effects of this reduction in transparency were most important for shallow nests."

How does this fit into the fishing equation? Start thinking black lights, fluorescent monofilaments, phyto- and zooplankton avoidance, water temperatures at depth due to sun "warming", etc. There are a lot of scenarios and potential behavioral/physical explanations and applications.

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September 19, 2008

Screenshots

Here are the screenshots from yesterday's crappie trip that I mentioned in the previous post. Click on any of the pictures to get an enlarged view.

This first one is one of my favorite spots I always stop at when on the lake. It is almost always good for a few crappie, and this trip was no exception. It is a pretty large but fairly dense piece of wood. I haven't seen this object when out of the water during drawdown, but I imagine it might be a giant tangle similar to the end of a gnarly old stump. Many times on lakes with little cover, as well as lakes that get drawn down, people will attach brushpiles to existing stumps. It is easier and quicker than bundling and weighting a homemade brushpile and then having to haul it out in your boat. It wouldn't surprise me if that is the case in this instance, either.

This next picture is a school of shad with a bunch of predator fish hanging immediately around and under the shad. The predators are fairly inactive in this picture as witnessed by the long streaks or lines stretching horizontally across the screen. More active predators would create wildly zig-zagging lines or streaks in a more vertical fashion, as well as the shad would most likely be a bit more compressed in the area they were being attacked. Still, if I were a troller and wanted to target these fish, the graph gives you the answer to a starting approach. The shad being in 5'-10' of water and the predators being largely in 10'-15', trolling something right through that 8'-12' zone would keep your bait right at the interface of where things would occur when activity picked up.

Finally, for all those forum posters I find on other boards that state that the arches are an imaginary thing and not truly representative of what you will actually see on your depthfinder (as opposed to what they display on the boxes), I submit you this picture. Nothing makes me hold my breath for a second like finding such a wonderful group of fish stacked up off the top of a break as in this picture. In this case I was actually graphing up the side of a rocky point when I encountered this group of fish sitting in 10'-18' of water. This is also a great testament as to why you don't want to run with your graph showing 'little fishies', which it does when you leave Fish ID turned on. You'll also notice a nice group of shad in the upper left of the picture. If I had to guess by the looks of things, I'd say this was probably a nice group of white bass either following or preparing to intercept that shad school. In cooler water I always have a jigging spoon or a Silver Buddy tied on for just such an occasion. Lesson here is it never hurts to have such an outfit rigged and ready when out graphing "just in case" regardless of time of year. Most anything will hit those baits including crappie, white bass and largemouth, the most likely predators you'll encounter in these instances. Once you catch (or snag, in some instances) one of these fish you can then change tactics accordingly. 

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September 18, 2008

More Crappie

Took advantage of the great weather and some meetings in the morning by taking the afternoon off also and heading out to Raccon Lake for some more crappie action. Started around 3:00 and stayed until nearly 7:30. Fished a different section of the lake today, and after a bit of moving around and graphing, I was able to find a few places where the crappie were grouped up decently. Also found 2 new spots which I added to the GPS log to go along with a couple others I fished today that I already knew about. We had a light ENE breeze, blue skies, air temps in the upper 70's and water temps the same. Water clarity was pretty good (light stain) and the lake looked to be at normal pool. Ended the afternoon with about 50 crappie total including quite a few chunks like in the pic. The better size fish were running between 9.75"-11". I also got several good graph shots that I'll post tomorrow.

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September 14, 2008

A Pretty Crappie Day

The weather forecast wasn't too promising for Saturday. Rain chances were supposed to be upwards of 80%, and Friday was a cloudy, drizzly day that was leading up to the heavier rain. But things started clearing out late morning, and the frontal path actually bumped itself a bit north and west of us. That was the window I needed to get the boat hooked up and out on the water.

Being in the little boat, I'm much more particular about paying attention to wind and wind direction. Some lakes set up much better for certain directional wind. This morning we had 10-15 mph winds blowing out of the SSW. That actually turns out to be a pretty bad direction for fishing most of the lakes near me. Gusts were approaching 20 mph, and the forecast didn't call for any let up as remnants of Hurricane Ike pushed their way north up the Mississippi R. and headed for the Midwest. After looking at the options, I decided Raccoon L. was the best shot I had at finding fishable water out of the jonboat.

Word on the Net had it that the crappie bite was really doing well out there, so that was what I threw in the boat as I loaded up my gear. Got out of the house around 1PM, made a quick stop at the local BP station for food and fuel, and away we went on down the road toward Raccoon. We ended up launching from the West side of the lake, right in the brunt of the wind and whitecaps. But a quick scan of the lake revealed a lot of protected areas once we could cross over to the East side. So that was where we headed in search of crappie. We hit a couple obvious laydowns and managed to pick up a few fish off each one. Seemed like you could get half a dozen or so to bite quickly before they caught on and shut down. Figured I needed to find some less intelligent fish (less pressured), so I fired up the graph and went to looking around.

It didn't take long before we found this nice stump/brushpile spot. Was kind of shallow but you can see the fish sitting in and immediately around it. Also lots of baitfish moving around through the water column, so a buoy went out and the tube jigs started flying. Didn't take long to hook up as the fish started coming into the boat. A little probing with the jigs showed the wood to be a bit more abundant on this spot than a single pass with the graph conveyed. After about half an hour and a slowing bite, we moved on and found a couple more areas very similar to the one in the picture. We managed to catch crappie off all of them. Some were stumps and some were laydowns. The real key was that none were visible to the naked eye. One thing I've found is that crappie fishermen tend to take the path of least resistance with their approach. If they can see a dock or a laydown, you can bet that it gets its share of pressure. You can still catch fish off these areas, but they (the fish) tend to either be a bit more cautious or run a little smaller in size.

While out on the water we also came across this roadbed on the graph. Thought I'd capture a picture to show. You can see the really hard bottom on both sides of the road. In this case, you could also look off toward the shore and see where the road entered the water, confirming what we had come across much further out in the lake. Roadbeds are a fairly common find in many of our reservoirs and frequently provide one of the few areas of hard bottom available in our frequently silted in bodies of water. If the wind wouldn't have been blowing so hard, I probably would have graphed it a bit more and tried to fish parts of it.

So the day ended a bit shy of 4 hours out on the water, and the final tally was about 60 crappie to hand. We kept a limit of 25 fish to take the ride home with us. Water temps were running about 77 degrees and the lake was in pretty good condition considering the area received over an inch of rain in the past 24 hours. Lake was white-capping over most of the main body, and this created a lot of mudlines and washes in many areas. Probably would have made great feeding areas for bass, but we avoided most of these areas in our chase for crappie. Staying out of the wind is a huge help when it comes to tossing 1/16-oz. crappie jigs on 4 pound line to specific pieces of submerged cover in open water.

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September 13, 2008

Hurricane Ike and Fuel Costs

One really good thing about the small boat has been the gas mileage, or consumption. Actually, I should probably say the lack of consumption. With hurricane Ike hitting last night, gasoline jumped to $5-$6 in many states in the Southeast US. Here today, our fuel price has gone from about $3.55 just 48 hours ago to $4.19 this afternoon. The last time I had topped off the fuel tank in the boat was August 3rd. I stopped today on the way out to Raccoon and filled it up, and as you can see from the picture of today’s gas receipt, it cost me all of $6. I'm not exactly sure how many trips I had made since that last fill up in August, but that averages out to about $1 per week in fuel costs, and being a 4-stroke, there is no additional oil charge. You can't get much better than that. I'll have a full trip report with some graph shots tomorrow.

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September 11, 2008

Sick and Wrong

Stopped by the marina for about 30 minutes after work just to throw a bait and hopefully catch a fish. It was a gorgeous evening and a good way to destress. As I usually do when shore fishing, I grabbed one rod and basically one bait. In this case it was the spinning outfit with the day-glo yellow PowerPro. I had a jighead tied on directly to the braid with a Paca Chunk trailer. Thought I'd pitch the riprap in the short amount of time I planned on staying. Took a bit but after 20 minutes or so I finally caught a bass on the jig/chunk combo. Now if you've ever fished with a Paca Craw trailer, you know darn well that they are the only other bait that can fall apart and become worthless as fast or faster than a Yamamoto plastic. Yammi's actually just fling off the hook the first time a fish shakes it's head, upon which the bait hits the water and sinks out of site. On Pacas the claws go flying off under the same scenario, and this fish was no different. Economists call it planned obsolescence, I believe.

Of course, that was the only Paca Chunk I brought, so it looked like trip over. But then I got a brilliant idea stolen right out of the playbook of my friend 'Asshat'. The challenge was on. Keep throwing the clawless stub of plastic left on my jighead and see if I could catch another bass. It felt really wrong, but I persevered on. Sure enough, 5 minutes later (after having caught a white bass doing this) a largemouth bit and got promptly landed - Mision accomplished. The picture (click to enlarge) shows the stubby rig I caught the 2nd fish on along with a brand new Paca that I had started out with. Another interesting but relatively meaningless experiment, sick and wrong on so many levels (LOL).

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September 10, 2008

The Power of the Graph

I got out for a few hours this weekend post front. I ran around shallow for a while and managed to catch about a dozen bass. Turns out that all of them were basically smaller bass, 14" and less. That is one observation I've noticed over the years, or at least it seems to stick out to me, that being that the fish are still active post front, it just seems that it is primarily the smaller fish. I tossed jigs around shallow cover, and tossed a little bit of topwater but never got bit on those. Moving onto breezy main lake areas though produced most of the bass for me on shallow cranks around weedlines.

I finally fired up the graph and went looking offshore. If you get comfortable using a graph there is a whole 'nother world on most lakes that many people never really take a hard look at. Yes, the well known points get hit along with things like humps and obvious roadbeds, etc., but every drop, every brushpile, every part of a lake becomes a possible holding area for a bass to be discovered. Such was the case when I went cruising off a large flat out in the middle of the lake and found a nice breakline with a small trough on one side and a nice deep water drop on the other. A buoy went out, the deep crankbait went sailing, and within a matter of 10 minutes I put this 4 pound plus fish in the boat. Chalk up another chunk to the power of a good graph.

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September 09, 2008

What You Want In a Setup

 

The above is a picture of my graph as I was running nearly wide open down the lake this weekend. Notice the 15.3 mph GPS reading in the top left corner of the graph [stop laughing :) - going fast is over-rated, and it doesn't help you catch more fish]. Also notice how well the unit is tracking bottom and following contours. You can be assured that you won't miss anything if your transducer is mounted correctly (so that no disturbance is being created around the transducer). A friend has the same unit on his Lund with a 60hp and can do 40+ mph (WOT) with the exact same type reading on his unit. If you take the time to set them up right, you'll never miss a beat.

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September 08, 2008

You Spent How Much?

Why not to drop big bucks on these high dollar custom paint jobs (LOL)...

 

Two trips and about 2 dozen bass later, my high dollar paint job is in trouble. Notice the missing eye, the belly scratches and all the missing paint off the top side of the lure. The bait is a Lucky Craft SKT, but I was able to pick it up for a very reasonable price (considering it is a custom). Almost makes me nervous to throw some of the other shallow runners I bought that I paid big bucks for ($20-$30+). Upside is that it's been catching fish, still runs good and will probably continue to catch many more. So how important is color on a bait???

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