Dike road bite...

[CrappieJohn]

Jimmy and I met for a morning of fishing on the dike road today. We caught fish pretty steady and marked tons of them. We could not find anything shallow, everything came from 11-14 feet of water and nothing on a jig without a waxie.

Size was a real issue and I think it is going to be a matter of placing restrictions on the sunfish in this area as was done on pool 5. The difference in the size of fish between the two pools is outstanding.

It was good to be on the ice again. We found that generally there was about three and a half to four inches of clear, solid ice.

[Deitz Dittrich]

Great report CT... Can't wait till the Backwater Brawl!

[CrappieJohn]

It's a bit early yet for a crappie bite to take set there yet. We did get lots of small crappies, but the big guys were camping else where for the day. To note: nobody was poking any of the nices crappies. This cold front is a pretty deep one and has driven all of the fish deep. Where Jimmy and I ended up we had about 14 fow and at times there were so many fish under us that the Marcum could not show the bottom! The band of fish was three, sometimes four feet thick! These were all sunfish and crappies too. We did get one dink of a perch and a half dozen small warmouths.

On a couple of different occasions today we marked noticeably larger fish about a foot over the others and assumed that they were bigger crappies, but the small ones simply beat everything else to the bait. We each has hits that when the hook was attempted to be set the rod tip never moved. Those were big crappies but they were oh-so-light-hitting.

[Dan Thiem]

Nice report Tom. Did you get to try out your new equipment?

[Stratosman]

Do you mean that pool 5 has a better size average than pool 4?

[CrappieJohn]

Stratos.....Sunfish are under special regulations in pool 5, primarily the number one can keep. The size of the fish seems, in my opinion , to be much larger. The limit on pool 5 is 10 fish.

[JIvers]

Quote:

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It's a bit early yet for a crappie bite to take set there yet. We did get lots of small crappies, but the big guys were camping else where for the day. To note: nobody was poking any of the nices crappies.

On a couple of different occasions today we marked noticeably larger fish about a foot over the others and assumed that they were bigger crappies, but the small ones simply beat everything else to the bait. Those were big crappies but they were oh-so-light-hitting.

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It's interesting how different waters, or different anglers, show different patterns. I do a lot of my MN ice-fishing around Winona, especially at the Airport backwaters, and my experience has been that the crappies there bite best at early ice. The first few days of fishing, I usually pick up a few nice crappies there during daylight, and more at dark. After a couple weeks, the crappie bite seems to go down, although that could be due to fishing pressure, which those waters get a lot of.

[CrappieJohn]

eye.....You are so right! I think that the cold front that we had to deal with was the culprit yesterday. On skinny ice the fish will get pushed into deeper holes and stack. The fish are still in the eating mode so competition is unreal. No snow and high skies made for some bright conditions and I think that all these factors simply had the larger crappies on standby until things darkened up later.

The larger crappies are fat right now from fall feeding and really don't HAVE to eat all the time. The small thre/four inch fish that were everywhere yesterday don't have that luxury....they have to eat and , as stated, competition is great. When these fronts hit, those large fish will just stay in the periferal areas and bide their time. Finding a spot or depth with comfortable light conditions is probably higher on their list that using unneeded energy competing with the little dinks.

If you pay close attention to what you are catching you will see patterns forn that show when cold fronts hit hard, the fish don't just quit biting, at least the small ones don't. The big fish, however get far and few between in these periods simply because they are reacting to the front and have become neutral or downright negative in mood. The key to larger fish is finding where they are hiding and NOT being bothered by the hordes of smaller fish.

I honestly think that the late ice-up has had an impact on where the better fish are. When we have "typical" icing conditions, say beginning in mid November, the fish have a chance to get oriented to winter habitat by now. The food migrates as well. What those smaller fish are feeding on is not what those big boys and girls are looking at on their dinner plate though and when THAT food source moves, so will those fish.

Something that a lot of peole ignore is water temperature. Lake Pepin hold a lot of heat and the flow southward brings the heat along with it. This particular area is not that far from the foot of the lake and this heat affects these backwaters more than one can imagine. As the water gets slowed down and shallowed up it loses that heat fairly quickly, but this is more noticeable in the lower reaches of the entire slough system and definitely more when you get closer to Alma. The backwaters below thew Alma Dam were consitantly 3-4 degree cooler on a given day than those temps found at the Wabasha Marina....right across the river from this are we are talking about. The trheee or four degrees may not be a big factor to crappies, but to their food sources it can be a huge detriment.

Eye...you are right about the differences. While we may be dealing with the same water per se, we are dealing with an entirely different world within a world. That is what makes it fishing.

[JIvers]

I drove up to the Dike Road this morning, and fished it for about three hours. I would describe the game fish as neutral to negative in mood. I caught four or five small crappies and a couple of small sunfish. They would cruise through every few minutes, look at a waxie on a hook for a bit, and then hit it lightly. So, no fish for me to eat.

However, the shiners were hitting really well--yes, shiners. I caught about a dozen of them on spikes--they would hit everything I dangled in front of them about five feet down, but they had trouble getting larger baits in their mouths. I threw all of them in the bucket with the shiners I bought in Winona, because they are just right for walleye fishing, and I am going up to Mankato this Monday. So in that sense, the trip wasn't a waste of time.