Last Day of Summer Crappie Fishing

    On Tuesday, my last day of summer break, I went to Lake Anna again with my brothers to do some crappie fishing. We put in at Hunter's Landing at around 8:00 and started working our way up the lake. We found good numbers of fish at docks 8 feet and deeper, and found that 10-12 feet of water held the best fish in terms of size. We fished the "slab dock" and pulled about 6 or 7 fish all in the 10.5-11.5" range, but none as big as the 13" fish Wyatt caught last time. We found piles of fish on every dock, but really never found solid schools of decent sized fish. Our weapon of choice for the day was pretty much any grub that was 2" long with a 1/16oz jighead, with 2" slider grubs being the best (I won't specify the color we used, but junebug and charteuse will always produce). On our way out, we decided to stop by a shallow dock that produced catfish and a couple white perch on our last trip. I dropped down a piece of cut threadfin shad (we found it dying on the surface) and pulled up a solid 11" white perch immediately! I dropped down another chunk and had an 11.5" off the same dock post as the first within 30 seconds. I only had one more chunk of shad (it was only 3" long) after that and it got picked off the hook instantly. I tied up a rig with an 1/8oz kastmaster spoon below a trout magnet and picked up two little ones before the bite slowed and we called it a day. I am not exactly sure how many crappies we kept (we weren't even close to a limit) but I know that I personally landed 31 and Wyatt probably landed more when I went on a trolling spree looking for white perch and stripers in open water (unsuccessfully). I will do my best to keep up the reports during the school year, but with hunting season approaching, my weekend may be occupied by my other outdoor pastime. You can check out my hunting reports on my other blog, www.virginiayouthhunters.blogspot.com. Thanks for reading!

These are the two big white perch I caught, 11" and 11.5"

 

Here is the day's haul of fish. I will add that we sent most of these to a friend who always accepts fish from us, we only kept around a dozen of them for ourselves (We have plenty of crappies in the freezer from various trips this year)