Crappie Update

As good as the rivers have been, the lake has been just as bad. It's hurt our winter time crappie fishing that I just take for granted most years. Traditionally I have a few extra deep brush piles that I fish vertically and just catch em pretty good. As 2016 came in we were receiving a huge amount of flood water that dirtied the lake up real bad. Cold dirty water is tough to fish, that's one of the few golden rules in fishing. Me and Bill (guy that does the radio show Fishing the Ozarks) went out yesterday in the gravois arm. Started off navigating around some fog, only to find some ice in areas still holding on from a cold morning. Fishing was slow but we managed to boat several crappie. We primarly were fishing docks and did a fair amout of shooting under the docks. I caught my limit of mostly white crappie half way down over 25 feet of water. Orange and chartureuse tubes with a nibble on a 1/16oz head caught more than any other color we tried. Water was just dingy enough to hurt the bite but it was fishable. Even fried some for dinner last night. Overall it was good to get back out catching some crappie again as I haven't even tried to catch them in several weeks. I know the bite has been tough and with all the great smallmouth I have been catching it's hard to get off that. But the crappie were catchable and we boated one or two of off most of the spots we hit. Found one dock that was hot, with every cast getting a bite for a while. Had the lake to our selfs too, only saw 2 other boats out. Won't be like that too much longer. The days are getting nicer and 5 weeks from now fisherman will be everywhere.