Blueman

I caught this 22 incher in 30 fow about 5' down at 2:00 with the sun blazin. I don't know what she was thinking.

I bought a boat that already had the minn kota terrova with the I pilot and it is awesome. If you can't afford that right now, I would suggest getting the minn kota powerdrive bow mount ($500). It has an 18' cord on the foot pedal so you could operate from the back seat. You could also add on the Copilot ($150) or I pilot ($450) in the future and have the wireless remote.

I use the buoy markers to keep track of where the pile is. As I am going over the brush I will throw one out before the start and throw out another one after the end. I have the minn kota with the Ipilot and used the anchor function. It worked OK for a while but we were having trouble feeling the 1/16th oz jigheads and getting them to sink so we went upwind about 50', threw out a real anchor, and let the wind hold us just beside the brush. Most of our fish were caught on bobby garland swimming minnow in a natural color. I think next time we will use slip bobbers to make sure we are at the right depth going over the top of the pile.

We picked up right where we left off last Tuesday. We came back to the lay down tree on the roadbed in 20 FOW and caught 28 keeper crappie from 4:00-7:00. We would cast out, count to ten, and slow roll light colored jigs on 4lb line bumping the top of the limbs. During a lull, we went over to a point to check out some surface action and picked up a 19" striper on an ultralight rig. They seemed to bite more when the sun was out between the clouds. Hopefully the rain and tournaments don't mess up the bite.

I took a screenshot of my pics. Hopefully they turn out.

There were still a ton on the downscan when we left. We mostly ended up casting past the brush with 4lb test letting it sink down about 10 feet and slowly reeling over the top. When we felt the line get heavy we would turn the reel hard to see if there was a fish on it. I have some pics, but it says they are too large to upload.

We fished near hwy 12 bridge today at 3:00 for a couple hours and caught about 20 crappie. A couple of them were right at 15". We found them held up on a tree in about 18' of water and jigged them with random colors. All the fish came off the same pile. The guy that was with me wanted to catch something bigger so we headed out to the islands but never hooked up with anything. We went back to the same tree and caught a couple more before we had to leave.

My old lowrance had pretty good contours out of the box. I just got a new humminbird 899 and the contours are pretty lacking. I see that there are a couple different map chips available for these units. Are the lakemaster maps pretty standard for what everybody buys?