Panfish Follies Report 5/3/07 (4 pics)

[Tyler Holm]

In the past week I’ve found fish up shallow over mud. You know what this means…. The panfish spawn is right around the corner for our Rochester area reservoirs and this also marks one of my favorite times of the year for large panfish.

Rugby and I hitup a pond not far from Rochester yesterday verified the first sentence. Fishing over deeper water yielded nothing except a few dink bass, but when we cast over shallow mud, the fish hit just bingo. When I say shallow mud, I’m talking 2-5 FOW or so. We were fishing about 2’ down under a float.

The crappies and gills were mixed into the same spots today and most all the fish were large (maybe caught 2 or 3 dink panfish all day). In an hour and a half of fishing we maybe caught about 30 fish each (70% sunfish). Doubles were common.

Our largest crappies maybe went 11”, but most were around 10” We didn’t have a tape measure with us but I would guess that many of our gills were real close to the 9” mark. Andy even got into 2 pumpkinseeds (lucky bugger).

Colarless 1/32 oz jig heads with full culprit paddletails did the trick today. I don't think color was a big issue, but I never had to change either. I was using purple/chart. Andy got the paddle nipped off a few times and monkied with some different colors and continued to catch fish.

All fish were released again today! This CPR (Catch, Photograph, and Release) mentality will continue until the spawn is over.

We didn’t catch any of the really black male crappies today, but the sunfish are starting to take on some beautiful colors. Lots of bright orange/red bellies and dark black gill covers.

[Crickschop04]

Looks as if you boys were living the high life