Big Indiana Bass

The Crappie Motherload

After months of being flooded and high due to all the spring rains we've had, my favorite crappie lake has finally been pulled down to normal pool elevation. A couple reports from earlier in the week said that the crappie bite had been "on" and that the fish were running larger than last year, many in the 10"-14" range. That combination, along with a weather report that included light winds at best sent me packing with a pair of jig sticks in the tin boat on a search for crappie. Things were slow for the first couple hours as fish seemed scattered and boat traffic was pretty bad. But 2 hours into the trip things changed for the better, and in a mighty big way.

I found the MOTHERLOAD! Quite possibly the best school of crappie I've ever found in Indiana. Fish, after fish, after fish for nearly 2 hours solid. I can't tell you how many I caught because I stopped counting a couple casts in. I don't know - 80, 90, probably 100 or more. What made it so great beside the numbers was the quality. At least 90% of all the fish caught out of this school were between 11"-12". Outside of about 4 or 5 little ones I can remember catching, nothing I checked was smaller than 10.5". I never popped a giant either, but nearly foot long crappie as fast as you can cast is nothing short of awesome in my Indiana book. A jig bite made in heaven. Now, if only they'll hold together until next weekend :)

Jon Boat Transducer Installation

Just because you have an inexpensive piece of aluminum that you choose to fish from doesn't mean you have to skimp when it comes to electronics. One of the biggest mistakes most anglers make is not utilizing their depthfinders as much as they should or to their full capacity. That especially applies here in Indiana. Part of that utilization for an aluminum boat owner is proper installation of the transducer for the best possible readings.

Unlike our fiberglass brethren that can install inside the hull for protection while shooting through the glass, aluminum boat anglers pretty much have little choice but to mount externally. Here then the key becomes proper placement and location. The ideal situation for most of these setups is using a fiberglass or composite transducer mounting plate like in the picture. These can be obtained at many of the larger marine center outlets. The advantage is one of less drilling but increased flexibility.

Installation of the board first to the hull using just 2 screws and a very generous amount of silicone between the board and the hull is the first step. Once in place, you are then free to move the transducer around as needed, higher or lower, left or right until you find the optimal location for reading at speed. This is usually the spot with the least amount of water disturbance coming from beneath the hull. Since the shorter transducer screws only penetrate into the composite board and not the hull, drilling and redrilling without need to refill and plug holes becomes the norm.

The other option, and the one I chose by default because the mounting boards were out of stock once I was ready to install my transducer - and I have little patience :) is to directly mount to the aluminum hull. Here the issue becomes one of "getting it right" the first time, lest you end up putting multiple holes into your boat that will all have to be sealed to avoid taking on water. The photo above right is my installed transducer from the side. It's hard to make out in the picture and is shown much better in the installation diagrams in your manual, but the transducer puck rides just about halfway below the bottom of the hull. This will allow for possible collisions with stumps or such, but is necessary to ensure a smooth supply of water to the transducer face for proper readings. I actually bumped mine a smidge lower than recommended because readings are more important to me than collision risk.

Here is another shot of my installed transducer from the rear. You'll also see a good section of the hull underneath. Here what you want to pay attention to is placing that transducer where the least amount of disturbance coming from the hull occurs. Things like dents, rivets and "lips", anything that create or allow air pockets to form are all bad from an install point of view. Again, the smoothest possible flow of water over the transducers face is what you are after. Avoid the running guides and other such areas as much as possible, and pay attention to how close to the motor you are also. Anything that creates turbulent water that could reach the trasnducer is a no-no.

Beyond that, a little tinkering with proper height and angle to obtain maximum reading clarity is all that is usually needed. When installed correctly you shold be able to get really nice readings at all speeds, from idle up to wide open. Anything less suggests some type of possible error in the setup.

Science Meets Sidescan

Anglers have a new toy to play with, as you've probably already become well aware. Seems like you can't go on an electronics fishing forum without multitudes of posts and pictures from guys using their Hummingbird sidescan sonar units. Maybe it's just sour grapes coming from a dedicated Lowrance junkie, but I frequently refer to such users in jest as the "Look, I found a tree!" crowd. That said, there is lots of potential for these units as more people continue to purchase and utilize them out on the water, and as technology and reliability get better and better. 

One of the common misperceptions is that these are the same units used by state and local agencies to find ditched cars and solve unexplained disappearances. Or that these ultra-detailed topographic maps being created and distributed are done so with the same units guys fish with on their bass boats. In most cases, the serious work is being done with very high tech units costing upwards of $70,000 or more from other companies. A recently published article in Fisheries Magazine might be the beginning of high tech/low cost alternative uses for these units.

In "An Assessment of Deadhead Logs and Large Woody Debris Using Side Scan Sonar and Field Surveys in Streams of Southwest Georgia", researchers used common, everyday bass gear to survey large stretches of a Georgia river system to document how much woody debri from old logging operations were present throughout the watershed. Some of the equipment and techniques were as follows:

• "We employed a Humminbird® 981c SI system to capture sonar imagery at all study reaches"
• "The SI system was connected to the Garmin GPSMAP® 76 GPS to provide coordinate information for image capture locations, at a stated accuracy of 3–5 meters (Garmin 2006)."
• "The sonar transducer was aft-mounted to the port side of a johnboat transom, and its frequency set at 455 kHz during sonar surveys."
• "The sonar range was set to 65 feet during the survey of Chickasawhatchee Creek and 80 feet during the survey of Ichawaynochaway Creek."
• "Coordinate data and sonar images were simultaneously recorded to the SI system during the survey. These data were recorded at regular intervals such that consecutive overlapping images were acquired."
• "Prior to the surveys, targeting exercises were conducted with a piece of PVC pipe (length 1.7 m, diameter 11 cm) submerged in various locations to evaluate our ability to image LWD-like objects."
• "Using Microsoft (MS) PowerPoint, we spliced overlapping sonar images together to produce a seamless mosaic for each study reach."

Researchers Adam J. Kaeser and Thomas L. Litts summarized:

Side scan sonar facilitates wood surveys across broad aquatic landscapes, enabling the examination of factors affecting the spatial and temporal patterns of wood distribution, and ecological associations (e.g., patterns of stream productivity), in ways deemed logistically unfeasible in the past. The applications of side scan sonar for mapping stream habitat extend well beyond woody debris. Our current work with the Humminbird® SI system includes GIS applications such as image geotransformation and mapping of stream substrates, topics we intend to present in forthcoming manuscripts. We hope that this research encourages scientists and managers to consider mapping, monitoring, and assessing stream habitat with low-cost side scan sonar, and suggest that future research evaluate the use of side scan sonar elsewhere to explore the effective boundaries of this
remote sensing technique.

The Dead Sea - 10/18

A gorgeous sunset...

 

An absolutely perfect shot of a submerged bridge...

 

Another awesome graph scene from today...

 

    

Brushpile

A nice screen shot from out on the water today.

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

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.