drumking, chickamauga, crappie, 5/17/10, Bassert

[FishNews]

Pat Ryan and I got out for a few hours of fishing today. It was a mixed bag sort of day. We started off looking at an old shellcracker bed and caught 4 shellies and about that many bluegills. Then we switched over to bass fishing downriver in one particular spot that I wanted to see if the fish were there yet. Only caught one largemouth there. Fish haven't congregated there just yet. I'm probably pushing the season on that a little bit. Then we switched over to crappie fishing and landed 19 crappie. I kept about 10 for dinner tonight. They were good. Yum yum.<br /><br />Crackers were caught on panfish assassins and 1" curly tail grubs on 1/32 oz jigheads. Bass was caught on a 4" dropshot worm and the crappie were caught on 1/32oz bg shads in various colors. It didn't seem to be much difference in the color today. We fished docks for crappie, gravel bars for shellcrackers and a vertical structure for the bass.<br /><br />The fishing was slow for quite a while. My fishing time watch gave the best feeding period as 2:50 pm and we started fishing at 11:00 AM. It was very slow until we hit that magic moment. We landed about 4 or 5 in a row including a double and I looked at my watch. It read 2:48 PM. The fish were right on time. We caught fish and had bites for about 40 minutes before they slowed down. Many folks don't think that there is any correlation in the feeding periods and that's ok with me if they think that. <br /><br />I had a great time with a very good friend and am looking forward to fishing with Pat again real soon. Being in Florida during the cold weather has about ruined him though. It took a while before he got back into the groove. He was doing a Fat Albert thing for a while. One fish of each species until the crappie went on a feeding spree. emoBig emoGeezer