Matt, Tom, or anyone else, what would you have done?

[setterguy]

I was out last night, fishing a small lake in Pine County. The lake is 30 acres, with two holes. One is 54 the other is 45, and there is a 37' shelf inbetween. We got out at about 3 and started drilling holes looking for fish. Drilled a bunch starting in 9' working out to 48, nothin. Tried going out to the other hole, nothin. Started working towards the shelf and there they were. In 39' of water anywhere from 18-25 feet down. By this time its about 5:15pm. They hit like crazy for about an hour and were decent size. Then as soon as it got dark, they shut off and then we all got a bunch of clutter on the bottom. I figure it was some kind of bug, or plankton. I went to every other hole we had drilled and found the same thing, until I got to 25 feet of water. Anything shallower than 25 didn't have any clutter but didn't have any fish either. Any idea where those fish went?? Shallow, onto the shelf, over the deep hole? It was a real stumper.

[CrappieJohn]

Your clutter was, as you suspect, probably a bug hatch or bloodworms. Perhaps your bottom content changed at about 25 feet and that was where the bugs life ends in that regard. Fish at this time of year are going to be putting on the feedbag when they eat. That's likely why you got into ahot bite. But at this time of year your fish are maybe entering into the transitional stage or are actively roaming and that's why they were there and then gone. These fish were more than likely finding preference in a particular depth of water, just not OVER any particular depth of water.

I'd imagine that the bite started off here and there and then got wild for a bit before waning down to nothing again. If you can imagine a weather map showing a hurricane from overhead, the wind goes in one direction and slowly this mass inches toward wherever. Crappies will be just like that in the water when they roam....the school however larger simply rotates at a certain depth with the usual strafifying according to size and slowly advances. Then the bite is hottest it is because the main body of fish is under you. The nearer to the edge of this turning mass you are, the slower the bite is.

This is where a camera would be a very good tool. You could have been ten feet away from the school's edge and not even known it because the transducer of the flasher reads pretty much down. I know a guy with a second machine set up with the transducer mounted on a four foot rod at not quite a right angle to the surface....it reads down about ten degrees. He will drop that in the drink and scan in a circle to see if fish are located off to the side of where he has his hole. Often times he finds that he needs only to move twenty feet to the side to find fish he'd otherwise assume were not there at all.

[Matt Johnson]

Those fish could have easily moved in to feed and then moved back out of the area. Some lakes will experience a real short window of opportunity and that could have been the case. Feeding time occurred and then they went on the roam again. I would be willing to bet they feed several times throughout the night as well in that same area. I've experienced bites where you catch fish from 4-6pm, then nothing from 6-9pm, then from 9-11pm they are going crazy, then nothing from 11pm-1am...and so on until the sun gets above the trees. It could be the situation where the fish know when and where to get their food and they have become accustom to doing so. You also have to take into account that this time of year brings on a lot of rapid movement by the fish. The two big migrations in my book are late summer/fall and late ice, and we are starting to see a lot of movements from the pannies, especially the crappies.

If I were to hypothesize, I would say those fish went either back over the deeper hole and put on the cruise control, or they went towards the deeper weededge to relax. Most of my aggressive crappie bites in the last several days have been in 7-15 feet of water right over weeds and on the weedline. There are still piles of fish out in the deeper water but they seem less aggressive than they were a few weeks back.

I bet if you got out to that spot where the fish were around 4:30pm or so they'd be there. You mentioned they were in between the two deeper holes, that makes me believe they spend a good portion of their time in deeper water, only to come out to feed on the shelf. However, those fish are (if they haven't begun to already) going to move shallower in the near future. You might have just experienced the initial migration.

What kind of shallow structure is nearby? Is there anything that connects to the shelf in between the deeper holes?

Good Fishin,

Matt Johnson