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By top_dollar •

Live bait rigs and mid week kimberling report

    Wt is about 82-83.  Been fishing main lake points and structure, mornings and evenings .  25-150fow, 25-40 feet down.  Live bait fished vertically as described below.  Im catching about a dozen or so per outing,  with almost half or more being keepers.  Pretty good ratio of keepers to shorts this year.  Lots of big fat 16 inch spots.  Finding smallmouth on the bottom in 25-35fow, some even up shallower.  Spots are mixed in with the smallies,  or suspended 25-30 feet down over infinity.  Catching most on live bait rigs. Jigging a 3/4-1oz spoon is also working very well, and catching bigger fish.   Only caught a few on a ds worm.  Lots of eater bluegills mixed in, and 1 5# channel cat. No walleye. :( gonna troll cranks for them today or tomorrow.

Heres what i do...

LIVE BAIT RIGS

Use a whole live night crawler threaded on a #4 baitholder hook.  Should be about 7-9 inches all stretched out in the water.   Ill sandwich a 1/16oz bullet weight between 2 bobber stops and 2 small beads instead of a split shot and either slide it down to the hook, or slide it up about a foot.  A med light or light power spinning rod, and 4-6# mono line.  Idle around main lake points from 25-150 fow looking for bait and fish on the graph between 25-40 ft.  Zig zag in and out of the channel and up on points and flats to see if they are suspending or near the bottom.  When the graph lights up, pitch the crawler about 25 feet and let it swing down under the boat, often times it stops sinking as one grabs it.  When it gets below you fish it as vertical as possible, even better if you can see your bait on the graph.  When the graph goes blank, reel up and move.

       If you dont do it often, you may wanna upsize and use a med light power rod with 6 or 8# line with a 1/8th oz weight, but i use a 7ft browning air stream, or a 7ft st croix panfish series (light power rods), spooled with 4# maxima, 1/16 oz weight and gammy baitholders.  Suspended fish in open water dont cause too much trouble, hence the light gear.  Ive caught channel cats pushing 10# on that setup.  Set ur drag right, keep ur hooks sharp, and trust your gear.

      Hold your rod with the tip about a foot above the surface.  When you get a bite, let the rod load just a bit, lean the tip towards the water an inch or two and lift firmly and steadily.  You dont wanna hammer em...good hooks will stick.  Its probably not gonna you many giants, but its a great/easy  way to catch awesome numbers of 12-16inch spotted bass and smallmouth.  Also, bluegills,  walleye,  white bass, and catfish are possible incedentals.  Hell one year we even caught a trout fishing a crawler off a deep dock in kimberling.   

Instead of a live crawler you can do the same thing with a drop shot worm, or a jigging spoon.  I always catch 10x more with a live worm, then a ds worm, but sometimes that jigging spoon is the way to go.  

JIGGING SPOONS

I think of them as a vertical jerkbait..generates that "get it quick!!!" Bite.  I normally use the regular sized C.C. spoon, its about 1oz or maybe a bit less. Very similar to the war eagle spoons which are also great.  I paint them to look like a shad, but leave some chrome. I also put a good treble hook on it, and feather the treble hook. I use a 7ft heavy power, SOFT tip rod.  Im talking parabolic rod soft.  You need LOTS of give.  I spool the rod up with metered braid fishing line (super helpful), and tie a 5 foot long fluoro leader (17#). I use an alberto knot, but a swivel works fine too if jist fishing vertically.  I fish it two ways....cast it out, let it sink to the bottom and snap it back to me in short but aggressive 2-3 foot snaps.  Its important to point the rod back at the lure after each snap, just like a jerk bait.  The other way i fish them is to drop it straight down to depth, using your metered line to know how deep.  Usually 25-30ft, then the short aggressive 2-3ft snaps, dropping the rod tip back to the water level after each snap.  This will maximize the erratic nature of the spoon. Jigging spoons are an absolutely imcredible tool on table rock.

 

DROP SHOT:

i caught more fish on a spoon yesterday then i have my entire life on a drop shot...im missing something with that technique. 

 

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bobby b.
4 hours ago, No luck said:

I just spent the week on indian point on table rock with  crawdad traps with wet cat food out every night. Didn't catch anything kids were disappointed. I read the lake is full of them but didn't get any. Anyone got any advice? Wrong time? Wrong end of lake?

 

I found that the trap makes all the difference for me.  The smaller traps you can get at Walmart never produced much.  I bought a bigger one from a bait store and it would be full of large crawdads.  I would drop it in 15 fow on our dock.

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No luck
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Thats a downer if u read the april mo conversationist mag it sounds like it's full of them.  Watched a YouTube video of a guy pulling a larger square trap out and it was full of them. Maybe the trap is the ticket.

 

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Boobie

I have one of the bigger traps prob 2ft. x 2ft. Cut blue gills 15 ft. of water and always caught plenty. The small traps never worked for me. I don't know if they escape or what but they just don't work. Table rock tackle used to have them.Would make seafood gumbo with my catchings!!!!! YUM.

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Smalls21

used to set up a square trap with crappie carcass after i was done cleaning them and would have about a half trap full, one time we put a dead snake in the trap, came back the next morning and the trap was almost overflowing. so i would go kill a snake and put it in a trap!

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WhateversBitin
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According to MDC, "Game fish or their parts may not be used as bait." While I mostly understand why, it still irks me a bit that our wildlife code will not allow sportsmen to utilize the entire fish. I think about this every time I dispose of what's left after filleting crappie or walleye.

Also, snakes are protected by state law. It is technically illegal to kill them. There are exceptions, such as a venomous snake in close proximity to humans, but I wouldn't use one to bait a trap.

This isn't meant to be a lecture. I just wanted to put out there that if you do this, you might have some explaining to do. 

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vernon
On 8/8/2018 at 8:35 AM, Smalls21 said:

used to set up a square trap with crappie carcass after i was done cleaning them and would have about a half trap full, one time we put a dead snake in the trap, came back the next morning and the trap was almost overflowing. so i would go kill a snake and put it in a trap!

Talk about some worthless advice! 😳

First off, I'd never be able to put a snake IN the trap to begin with and even if I could, I'd never be able to get the crawdads back out with the snake in there!

Guess I'll just have to keep buying my crawdaddies at the snake free store....... 😏

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Smalls21
7 hours ago, vernon said:

Talk about some worthless advice! 😳

First off, I'd never be able to put a snake IN the trap to begin with and even if I could, I'd never be able to get the crawdads back out with the snake in there!

Guess I'll just have to keep buying my crawdaddies at the snake free store....... 😏

To be honest I had nothing to do with the snake other than it scaring the LIVING monkey dodo out of me, and was fearing for my life and i had to kill it, and when we emptied the trap there was no snake left

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