So, I'm several days late with this report, but to be cliche, it's better late than never!
Last week I went to the Game and Fish offices and picked up a few scale envelopes to help out with some crappie surveys at Bartlett. They really want to know the growth rate of the crappie here since they seem to be growing at an insane rate! At the time I planned on going out over the weekend, but then the storm hit and I changed my mind. After hearing about the storm that's going to roll through tomorrow, I said eff it and decided to go.
Anyway, to the report! I picked up my mom and we got on the water around 9:30 to some crazy wind and waves (I was not expecting this). I didn't want to get minnows, so I decided to try the Bruce method and toss jigs into the trees and try to get some reaction bites. Headed up to the Yellow Cliffs and saw a lot more boats out there then I expected. Even ran into Bill and his wife! It was nice to chat with him since I haven't seen him since SCF 2018. He said he had a hand full of crappie drifting the trees out there. So I went around and found the trees I wanted to fish and tossed my orange markers out since I knew I wasn't going to be able to stay still with all the wind.
I tossed about 15 different colors of grubs with different weighted jigs trying to find out what they wanted. There didn't seem to be any kind of pattern, except that 2 were caught with the Purple/Char jigs. Because of the wind, I ended up slow trolling against the wind and drifting with the wind around my markers, and that's how we got 4 of our crappie.
In the end, we only caught 5 black nose crappie and a dozen or so dink bass. It was tough for me to experiment with a different technique with the wind howling and try to get all the information and scales for Game and Fish. Lesson learned, and I'll have a better approach next time!