Claycomb

I don’t want to make my ignorance publicly known but … so be it. Used to be I did good on crappie until the end of May, first of June but the last 8-9 years I’m still doing good on them up until July and even a couple of years up until I knock off to start backpacking and bowhunting in September.

The crappie fishing is still hot in places. I met Philip Bowden at church one day. He came up to me and said he’d met me at Scooter’s Youth Hunting Camp a month before. Somewhere in the midst of conversations with him and his mom it was decided that I needed to take him crappie fishing.

Well, one thing soon led to another and I was soon lined out to take him and his brother Jonathan crappie fishing. Their mom dropped them off and we took off for the lake. Poor kids. I took my little Ford Ranger so one of the kids had to ride in the super small seat in back.

I’m sure the air conditioner worked at one time but it’s probably been over 15 years since it has! But despite the vehicle and the hot weather, we all made it alive to the lake.

We unloaded and took off for my secret hole. It always amazes me how one week you slaughter them in one spot and a week later they’ve moved and you have to relocate them all over again. The last two years it seems like when I locate them that they’re in a small area, like an area along the bank only 15-20 feet long. So even if I told you what lake I caught them on last week and the general locale, you’d still have to find that one 15-foot area.

We hit a few spots that were hot last week but nada this week and we tried a half-dozen spots. After one and half to two hours, we finally got into them. They started hitting pretty good. As is usual, if I have anyone fishing with me, I have all of us use different color baits until we can determine which color is working best.

You may wonder why the hot color is always changing but if you think about it a minute, you’ll likely figure it out. I think the favorable color changes are due to three main factors:

• What color of bait that they’re feeding on.

• The water clarity which affects what color shows up best.

• Sunlight/cloud cover. This can also affect what colors show up best.

It didn’t take long to figure out which color was the hot one. I had never used Z-Man plastics before but I believe it was Philip that I gave a chartreuse-colored Z-Man Shad FryZ plastic to try. They’re a little shorter than I normally use, only 1.75 inches long, but he was tearing them up. So Jonathan and I changed over right fast and we smoked ‘em.

It took us one and half to two hours to find them but then we ended up with 88 keepers. We got some nice crappie. We didn’t throw back but about eight small ones. We did catch quite a few bass but I don’t remember any of them being over 6 inches. They were super small.

I’ve been catching one to three catfish each trip, but we didn’t get any this time. You always know pretty fast that it is a catfish because pretty soon it is straight below fighting you. But last trip I had one that was strung out far like a crappie.

I got excited because I thought I may have hooked an Oregon record crappie. I fought it for a good while and finally got it in. I thought it was going to be a 16-18-inch crappie but alas, it only turned up to be a 2½-pound catfish that didn’t know how to fight like his siblings.

Normally I net 80% of my crappie or else due to their soft mouths they’ll rip loose as you’re trying to boat them and especially so on the big ones. But this year they’ve really been swallowing the jig so on this trip I only lost one at the boat.

Well, we soon had our cooler over three-quarters full so we started heading back to our truck. What a fun day and it was good to get out fishing with two likeable young men.

Tom Claycomb is an outdoor writer who conducts dozens of seminars each year in the Western United States.