1128151649 KERSWILL LAKE ~ FISHING FOR THE TABLE

20151128 – today we had the great opportunity to fish the most severe cold front conditions I have ever faced on a lake…

a 30 deg drop in overnight temps the past few days today’s left air temps hovering in the upper teens producing skim ice across the lakes surface with clear skies and calm winds. Earl and I were anxious to get started. What! Why would any knowledgeable fisherman expose themselves to inevitable failure! One of the most heavily fishing pressured lakes I have had a pleasure to fish and no one else was out on the lake! The reason why we were out there is to gain the knowledge and log time on the water… “fishing those bad days makes you a better fisherman”

Starting off Earl was at the bow scanning the shallows for activity… minnows… b’gills anything. He spotted a few crappie and gills sitting close to the bottom widely scattered in the gin clear water. Some shorelines still had skim ice. The sonar registered widely scattered fish expanding to all vertical space in the water column. I was hoping to spot some congested schools of B’Gills to vertical jig but could not mark a waypoint on anything. I through over a tungsten jig attached to an UL ice rod and dropped it down to some fish suspended above 30 ft of water. Nothing no response. So we moved shallow to where we had the last activity of days ago. Earl noticed a pattern of many crappie including some jumbos widely scattered over the barren flats. We drifted the boat in very calm water over these fish and literally dropped the jig in front of their noses with no response from the fish. Comatized is the word I just then coined for that behavior… amazing… you had to touch the jig to the fish for a response.

I then knew we were in for a very tough outing but we knew that going in. so our best strategy lie before us… we knew some gills and widely scattered crappie were present but were inactive so we would fish till they start responding… so while doing that we picked off a number of preds and kept a LMB in the slot at between 14-16” long… no N.Pike were targeted for the day so all of them were released. We experienced a wide gap of non-activity and remarkably at 16:01 we started getting hits with the N.Pike missing many Jumbos at the boat with cut offs and experience d many bite offs with lost jigs. The 2” Power Minnow with bling was hit many times by the pike.

The cold started settling in quickly and Earl called 3 more casts … I agreed. In those 6 cast we boated 2 crappie in the slot of 10 Inches or under… now they awake! Sun fading fast we adhered to the call and started tidying our tackle and straightening our rods. I noticed a loop in one of my rigs and I lightly casted it out and nailed my best fish of the day a 13” class crappie on the Power Minnow.

The pattern of the day was we luckily noticed the neutral crappie on the bottom in less than 6 ft of water and waited them out while catching a few preds along the way. Its to bad they started hitting so late in the day but we came out of this with valuable gained knowledge and the time on the water. We werePanfish Rigged and Pred Ready … baits that have been proven with experience to produce pan fish as well as the larger predator fish and Ultra Light tackle rigged with Super Line to winch them in. ultra thin and strong line on Ultra Light spinning rods gives you that great fighting experience and yet gives you the extra confidence against line breakage.