Keith Lusher 03.07.23
Crappie fisherman seldom agree with one another in the case of lures or method. But one factor they do agree on is the easy indisputable fact that the important thing to discovering crappie is to seek out construction. Submerged brush piles, fallen bushes, underwater root-balls have lengthy been a goal for sac-a-lait fishermen in every single place. However, there’s a kind of construction that usually will get missed. I just lately made a fishing journey with veteran crappie angler Tim Bye of Folsom, La the place it wasn’t wooden we focusing on, however lilies. Our journey started on the Tchefuncte River which is south of interstate 12 in Covington, La. Bye became a dead-end canal that was clogged stuffed with Pennywort lilies similar to the greenback weed that grows in years throughout the south.
I began by dropping my jig down alongside the sting of the lilies. Bye pointed to the middle of the grass mat. “The fish are right in there,” he’s mentioned, as he glared at his Garmin LiveScope Screen. Bye lowered his trolling, turned it on excessive, then picked it up because the boat pushed into the lilies. He then proceeded to succeed in over the facet of the boat and filter out a gap within the grass about two ft away. He glanced at his electronics display screen then slowly lowered his Bobby Garland tube-jig down, when his arm shot up as if a triggered was pulled. The water trembled beneath the lilies and I witnessed a 14-inch crappie erupt out of the 6-inch gap. The fish shot up and over the facet of the boat and flopped on the floorboard.
As Bye unhooked his fish and put it within the live-well, I lowered my jig down and waited for a thump. A number of seconds glided by however I didn’t really feel something. Bye advised me to decrease it down one other foot. I lowered it down and felt a thump. My response, whereas not as fast as Bye’s, was fast sufficient to snag the fish and ship him flying out of the outlet, over the gunwale, and into the boat.
“The tricky thing about fishing these mats is it looks shallow underneath, but in reality, sometimes there’s 20 feet of water under these lilies,” he mentioned. After caching three fish from underneath the mat, we motored farther into the reduce and located one other set of lilies. After the identical routine we managed one other three fish all measuring over 10 inches.
We continued fishing each grass mat we got here throughout selecting up a number of fish at each one. “The river is loaded with crappie right now and they’re under these lilies but most guys don’t want to mess with them,” he mentioned. At the tip of the day we saved 15 crappie for the fryer and, being from the south, I skilled the closest factor to ice fishing that I’ll ever expertise. Some fish we pulled out of holes within the grass had been lower than a foot away from the facet of the boat. Bye recommends giving these mats a attempt throughout the upcoming spawn. “Those fish like structure — period — and these mats provide plenty of cover for big slabs in the shallows,” he mentioned.
