" FISH ON"

Chris was catching small fish and I was catching larger fish. The best fish were holding 3 feet under the smaller fish. However, this is not always the case. When I started trolling 6 years ago, I wondered how people knew how deep they were fishing. I would speed up, slow down, speed up, and slow down. I would catch a couple of fish on the downfall. There had to be something positive. After 2 years of being beaten to death, I finally settled on going to a neck of continuous 10-ft. of water. I would troll at a speed until my jigs hit bottom. I would then memorize what it took for 1/32 and 1/16 oz. jigs to bottom out. I would judge my speed by spitting in the water and seeing how fast it went by. I graduated from that class with a dry mouth. I learned of a speed control that would be sensitive enough to hold me at approximately 1-½ miles per hour. It is made by Luhr-Jensen in Oregon and sells for $42.00. Now I am back in class at the 10-ft. neck. After hours of practice, I was able to judge any size jig within 6 inches of where I wanted it to be. That is how I was holding Chris at 11 ft. deep and I was holding at 14 ft. deep. I use a MinnKota 865MXT autopilot. You absolutely have to use a variable speed motor to troll properly. On most boats a 5-speed motor running on speed one will be too fast. My motor works perfect when I am guiding, I sit or stand in the middle of my boat and my trolling motor will do my bidding. One man is up front the other is in the back and I am free to help any way I can. I reel in and change colors, I break off hangs, I untangle lines and sometimes I have to reel in a fish. My autopilot allows me to do this. Chris and I have worked out our colors and depth for Saturday. He was using 1/32 oz. Tripple Ripple Grub and I was using 1/16 oz. Hal Fly. He also had on two 2 inch Kalin Grubs. Their colors were fire tiger and chartreuse shad and he caught several fish on these. These crappie are holding 11 to 14 ft deep in 22 ft. of water. This is their staging area during the pre-spawn season, and they are stacked in an area about 40 ft. by 60 ft. We caught three 2-lb. crappie, about 10 or 12 (1 1/2) lb. fish and a passel of butterbeans before we agreed to move on. NEXT STOP: Dutchman Creek! Get out the cheap jig heads... BAD PAINT JOBS! Torn bodies; unpainted heads and whatever else are lying on the floor. This is where you learn how to break off, sometimes 3 or 4 at the time. My uncle taught me many years ago that if you don't get hung, you are not going to catch crappie. At times, this is very true. It is now 9:45 am on March 22. We caught about 50 crappie and kept probably 20. The wind is getting pretty rough now and my boat is getting hard to handle. We have trolled about 200 yards through the stump fields and picked up several crappies, but no good ones. Chris and I both are pulling 1/24 oz. heads 9 ft. deep. We are now starting to make a turn into the dogleg left. It goes into a big mud flat that is 200 yards across both ways. The water here is 7 to 10 ft. deep. The northwest wind is behind me and starting to push me too fast. At this speed, our jags are probably 3 to 4 feet deep. My speed control is on number 6 and it should be on 2 1/2. NEXT TIME: Fishing in wind and Pre-spawning crappie. As always, your comments are welcome. Just e-mail: