panfish What's Working Now...

[DrJuice1980]

Hey Gunner, dont be afraid to tie a slip bobber on and work those weed lines more.  Some times when you troll you'll get one or 2 but if you worked it with a bobber presentation you could pick up more.  I like to cover water too but crappies seem to school together more than any other species so when you find one, youll find more.  

[gunner55]

Thanks Dr. J, I've done that with success at times. We had a couple other boats close by that day & they were using bobbers & minnows  while anchored just inside or just outside the weed line. Our action was  at least 2/1 to theirs. Today was about the best day of the season for us as we had some hot action( C & R) for about an hour, maybe more, using the same method.The trip back in today was a bit challenging though as the fog had rolled in heavy. Being versatile is a key as we all know,changing colors, adjusting the depth as they move deeper, even adding a minnow to the jig, we will even let it fall on a semi-slack line at times to see if they want it on the fall. Good luck guys, it's some of the best fishing of the year here.

[dfv87]

What size of Pimples do you use and what type of gulp do you use?  This seems like it would be a good technique in a little deeper water?

I use the smallest size they have and sub out the treble hook in place of the single hook. I thread on a gulp minnow or gulp jigging grub (twisty tail) and work it. This can be trolled slowly or verticle jigged. My personal favorite lure... 

[DrJuice1980]

Nice work Gunner.  I never anchor up.  I always have one foot on the trolling motor pedal.  Allows you to find those "Sweet Spot" weed patches or little fingers that jet out and those will usually hold more fish than a weed line itself.  Could be as small as a 50 square foot area too.  

 

When you troll these tube jigs whats your speed and depth and weight?  How do you know how deep you are?  Those questions always led me to the slip bobber routine.  Also the slip bobber allows you to control drop speed, crucial for triggering that crappie bite. I'm not trying to argue here, just want to know what I am missing.

[gunner55]

I typically don't worry about the speed too much, it's all about boat control for me. I've found in order to control the boat & maintain feel I usually need to troll into the wind as we have PD 55 on the bow that we use almost all of the time. For speed I'm concerned mostly with keeping my line as vertical as possible because the bite can be very light(almost ice fishing like) some times. It can be a struggle as the wind will catch the bow & turn you completely around,if your distracted. When I get it right my line is straight up & down, or close, & the boat is creeping forward, when this is happening & I'm catching fish, I glance at the GPS, the speed will not even register.As for weight, I'm fishing 1/16 oz 80% of the time. I rely on my graph for depth, whatever depth the fish are in, I watch to see how far off bottom they( if they even are) while counting down my jig  so it's a foot or 2 above them. I typically don't fish this pattern much deeper than 20-25 ft as I'm 80-90% C & R & deeper than that they are not releasable. I do use a slow lift/ fall on a semi-slack line at times & a 1/32 oz jig for when the bite is off a bit. I almost forgot to mention, a real good map chip is a huge help. We have the LM UMFG in 1 ft contours on our Lowrance, it seems to be very accurate. I didn't know I was going to write a book, lol, Tight lines everyone

[gunner55]

With the need to make small adjustments in speed & direction, I don't believe the standard foot pedal control for the PD TM will work very well ( see earlier post). The 1 I use is a old style that was designed to be clipped to your belt, it goes on the steering wheel in my boat. After being a little off the bite since the warm weather came back, I found some this morning & they were suspended(15-20) in deeper (25- 30) fow.

Edited August 31, 2015 by gunner55
added to post

[DrJuice1980]

Sweet Info Gunner, thanks for the detail!  Really paints the picture.  Crazy how much work goes into catching fish when you actually stop and think about it.  I'm usually headed up wind as well, have to reset everything and re-position the boat on every fish on those windy days.  

[Thalmann]

Dr Juice - I as well use the foot pedal most of the time and like to look for those sweet spots you mention.  Although when I do find the pockets or fingers I tend to anchor up on them and more times than none you will pick off the bigger fish right away and then have to move again.   I do this and then I give it 20 minutes or so and move back to that spot and it seems like the larger fish will move back into the pockets as its easy for them to pick off meals and then go back under cover.  

[gunner55]

Happy to share it with you Dr Juice. After all that's what HSO is about. 

Edited August 31, 2015 by gunner55

[Marshall6249]

I want to first say thanks for all the great info on here! My wife and I were up north last weekend, and I was looking for crappies. A few weekes ago found some piled up under a road bridge after the rain. Had some success with them. Went back and didn't mark anything to exciting. We did manage one from under there. Then I changed up to fishing walleyes. Went out to a mid lake flat and the wife pulled in a nice 13" crappie. So we switched gears and tried to target more, but nothing else wanted to bite. The lake I fish is Big Sandy. Has great crappies, but I haven't really gone after them during open water. The lake has limited vegetation as reeds, coon tails, cabbage, etc... but what it has a lot of is wild rice. Is the wild rice worth checking out at all? I haven't fished around it much and I don't believe it grows to great depths. Maybe 6' would be the deepest? not sure... The lake also has a lot of bottom structure as in underwater points, flats steep drops. I do watch the older guy down the shore line fish from the dock and pull in some crappies from time to time, but he is a stickler for people fishing in front of his dock. His dock comes out to nice deep water from shore and a flat dies off just to the left of it. I can find no other structure than that around his dock. During this time of year, are you looking for the shallow to deep water areas and does trolling slow and covering water the way to go in these areas? Or drive around on the trolling motor and try to locate? Thanks for any info guys.

[dfv87]

Dr Juice... I also troll those Swedish Pimples tipped with the Gulp Alive Jiggin grubs (aka twisty tails) or Gulp Alive minnows... the Crappies love them along a weedline just snap the lure every once in a while to change the depth and let it fall back to drop in the column... one of my favorite ways to fish in the late summer/fall. Trolling motor at .5 max to keep those small baits down. 

[gunner55]

M6249, you didn't say but it sounds like you have a place on the lake. If so then where do you get your bait? I would ask them, not for specific spots but what to look for. You say it has great crappies, the bait shop should know if the bite is shallow or if they are suspended over deeper water.They will move both horizontally & vertically as conditions change(light,wind, even surface temps) so covering water is the way to go.At least until you find some then you may want to slow down to work the school. One thing that won't change is that they will be near some type of food.

[dfv87]

Marshall, It has been years since I have been on Big Sandy but they used to have some deep edge weed lines with tall cabbage like weeds. The eyes and Pike would sit on these weed lines looking for Panfish in the fall. I would look for something similar as a starting point, but be prepared to get bit off by some toothy critters but a pike on a UL is the definition of Chaos/FUN! As gunner said look for food options and you will find all types of fish.  

[Corey Bechtold]

Holy cow.  Not fishing in 3 weeks is not good!  I felt like I had to relearn how to fish.  There have been a lot of changes since the last time I was out.  Water temps were down almost 10 degrees and weeds were much different as well.  The first lake I fished only yielded Bluegills hugging the bottom in 8-10'.  I wanted to target Crappies so moved to a different lake.  There the water was clear and there was a drastic thermocline at 22'.  It didn't matter where we were on the lake the Bluegills would not leave us alone!  We caught very few Crappies and most of them were smaller.  Fan casting Gulp!  1" Minnows worked but with all the pecking from Bluegills  it was a better bet to use Powerbaits as they are more durable.

The next day I went back to search harder.  I reversed the lake order and had similar results.  One thing was much different on the second lake though.  The bigger Bluegills had moved and were very fussy.  I noticed  the water got much dirtier overnight and there was a lot of floating shells in the water.  I guessed that the Bluegills were rummaging along the bottom and my guess was right.  We switched up a bit and used smaller jigs tipped with Gulp! Minnow heads. The key was to have most of the hook covers and really focus on keeping the bait close to the bottom. We did pretty well in 10-12' and ended up keeping just enough 8" Gills for a meal.

I hope to get out this weekend and see what this warmer weather will do to the Crappies.

Hope everyone is doing well and finding some fish!

Good fishing,

Corey Bechtold

[Marshall6249]

Thanks guys for the info. Will try looking for some deeper weeds and try that as a starting point. Looking forward to a long weekend on the water. Good luck to all and have a fun/safe weekend!

[th64]

Marshal-from what I have heard man made and/or woody stuff is best on that lake-floating docks, planted wood structure by docks etc. Side finder would help. Crappies and gills there are nice if you find them, bait vendors there hear very little.

Good luck

[pushbutton]

What worked for me recently. ... was actually going fishing. We hit transition time dead on though and the fish were all over the place. Found gills roaming the flats between the weedlines and deep water during the day,  cruising shallower  morning and afternoonish, also a couple underneath the just forming crappie schools. Similarly, the crappies were all over the board as well. Deep weedlines, even deeper breaks, the same feeding flats,  rafts or deep docks, and  some making shallow low light food runs near where they were starting to school. 

The week started good, but as the temps rose and wind blew it was pretty tough go by the end. Finding active fish was more important than presentation. The wind pretty much ruled out most finesse set ups.....so just went big and mostly meat. Big chunks of crawler on a blade and bead j hook snell for the gills. Actually caught about a dozen decent crappies on that as well....lol. For them mainly used  a 1/ 32 or a 1/16 with added split shot hair/flu flu type or just a plain jig tipped with smaller fatheads. Always a good time to get away for a week and fish, but think we were about a week too early this year.......the best fishing of the year will be here soon and hope some will be able to get out and get some! 

 

[Corey Bechtold]

I've been noticing a few patterns starting to shape up my last few outings.  First is the water temps have been slowly falling and the water is starting to clear up.  With weeds being a key factor searching for good weeds has proven to be a key in recent success.  I have been finding both Bluegills and Crappies roaming the edges of these weedbeds and feeding.  I have been throwing mainly Berkley Gulp! Alive! 1" minnows on a 1/32oz jighead.  At times fishing under a float has produced better.  I run with the Thill center sliders just like I do in Spring.  Today I had a slamfest fan casting Berkley 2" Ripple Shads and retrieving them quickly over scattered weed flats.  Some of the bites were ferocious!  

Fall is a special time of year.  Less recreational traffic and less boats all around.

One quick note to anyone that has a smart phone and uses the Navionics App.  You seriously owe it to yourself to take a look at the Sonarphone from Vexilar!  I have done some mapping on some of he lakes I fish and the results are awesome!!!  A lot of lakes aren't very detailed and this tool really helps find those "spot on the spots".

Hope everyone is finding some fish and having fun.

Good fishing,

Corey Bechtold

[gunner55]

Still finding some on the weed line at low light using the same method I described earlier. With surface temps edging towards 60, it' not like it was though. Many here fishing deep water(40-50), not me as I do C & R a lot.

[gunner55]

Found a few in the basin type area last week. Must have been nose down in the mud, jig & minnow

[DrJuice1980]

Kayak and wet suit?

 

[Drewski]

I finally decided I had to get out on the ice somewhere this past weekend. I had been hearing reports of fishable ice in the area, so I told my good friend Kyle Sandberg to come north and try to find a few fish!

The first lake we hit Saturday morning didn’t pan out; there was only 4” of ice and we were the only ones on the lake, so naturally I was a little hesitant on venturing very far. We tried in front of the access by the first break for a while and only caught a few small perch. So after an hour or so we packed up and headed to the next lake.

The next lake had great ice conditions, which put my mind at ease right away.  There was a solid 6-8” everywhere. We started our search in the main lake basin, where we started finding some very nice gills in 14-17’. They weren’t fast and furious, but we had consistent action throughout the day. They were on fire when they came in on the Vexilar, however, crushing our tungsten jigs and plastics. Color didn’t seem to matter much; both Kyle and I were having success. I was using a red northland tungsten fireball jig with a chartreuse Berkley Gulp! Alive 1” fish fry and Kyle was using a chartreuse tungsten jig with pink and orange Micro Nuggies. I also tried using the new Berkley powerbait whipworms; I found myself really liking these new plastics! They have great action and durability.

Towards evening, we decided to stay in the same area and wait it out to see if crappies would move in at dusk. Needless to say, it payed off! About a half hour before dark crappies began moving in, and we caught our fair share of fish. Nothing huge, but a few fish around the 12” mark.

On Sunday, conditions changed. It went from being partly sunny with south winds to cloudy and north winds. We started searching in the same basin area again with little to show for it. We had a few gills here and there but it wasn’t nearly as consistent as the day before. So, we decided it was time to try something else and began drilling holes shallower on a nearby weed flat…and bingo! The fish were there and they were hungry. We found a nice mix of gills and crappies hanging in the weeds from 10-12’. As soon as you moved off the weeds, however, it was a ghost town. We used the same jig and plastic combos as the day before with great success.

Overall it was a great first outing of the season! I can’t wait to continue to learn the Detroit Lakes and Pelican Rapids area more and more each year.

For those of you itching to get out, just remember that ice conditions are varying widely across the state. Lakes in many areas just froze over, and some bodies of water still aren’t frozen yet. So use caution and common sense when going out; if you are at all hesitant, wait! It’s not worth risking your life for a few fish.

Good luck!

Drew

 

[monstermoose78]

Great report!! Congrats on the nice fish!! Thank you for sharing

[Tom Sawyer]

Thanks for the outstanding report Drew. 

I've also had success with the Whipworm this year on gills and crappie. 

[IceHawk]

Great report some nice gills there.