"Binge" Fishing

Every once in a while I find myself going fishing several days in a row.  I had that opportunity this past weekend.  I took Friday off to head up to Okoboji for a tournament I had on Saturday.  Two days on probably the best lake in Iowa, I was excited and a little apprehensive too.  I had never fished this body of water in the spring before, but was pretty sure my partner, Doug Chaloupek and I could catch a limit of 3 bass in the tournament.

Our practice day on Friday went well, we had three different areas on the lakes that we caught several bass in.  Two were close to each other while the other one was about a 15-minute boat ride away.  We had decided if we got some early bites in the two locations that were close, that is where we would spend the entire day.  Well, we spent the entire day there, as I put three keepers in the boat in less then 30 minutes.  So we had all day to upgrade our catch.  We did use all day to upgrade, catching about a dozen keepers that day.  We weighed in 3 keepers for about 8.50#, I figured that would put us in the middle of the pack...I was off, we ended up 15th out of 21 boats.  I have asked myself over and over this week...should we have gone to that "other spot" to try and catch a bigger bass?  I guess I will never know.  I do know that Doug and I fished a good tournament, and we stuck to our game plan.  We also picked up a lot of knowledge about that body of water in the spring months of the year.

That was the first two days, now for day three of fishing.  Before fishing however, I had a few things to do.  I was directing a tournament that day, the Hot Rod Baits Bass Series at Rock Creek Lake.  The tournament got started without a hitch, and then it was time for David Bowles and myself to go chase some crappies.  We grabbed some minnows and hit the lake in search of crappies.  16 boats were off to catch bass, and I was off to catch crappies...it was a little weird for me that was for sure.  It took a little while, but we found the crappies.  Once we found them, it was all about the catching!  We caught about 60-70 crappies in about 4 hours.  All were very shallow getting ready to spawn, we picked off the male crappies that hit our minnows one foot below our bobbers.  How relaxing was that...TOTALLY!  It reminded me to take advantage of the panfishing in the area and to go out fishing for them more often.  "Binge-Fishing" you should try it! 

Watching your bobber go down is sooooo fun, I need to do it more often.
This is a typical 9 inch crappie from Rock Creek Lake.