Crappies!

My cousin and I were right when we had predicted that those crappies would be still large in number and heavier in size in our grandpa’s pond (this was described more in depth in the post “Tracks in the Snow”). It didn’t take long at all for us to know we were on them as soon as I dropped the vexilar I saw several bleeps near the bottom and also suspended at about 7 feet of water. As soon as I dropped the waxworm loaded shrimpo down through the hole several more bleeps showed up and not a second later I was pulling up a healthy crappie out of its watery home.

After about an hour my cousin and I had nearly 50 of these crappies caught, we deemed it sportsmanlike though to keep only a half dozen of these crappies that we had caught, the smallest being 9 inches or so. It seems funny to think now that we got tired of catching all those crappies, and after that blitzkrieg like hour we soon went to another one of my grandpa’s pasture ponds to pursue some bluegills and some bass.

There is a huge number of crappies in this pond and because of the pond’s small size (approximately half an acre) I want to create a good population of good sized crappies. I think this will be a hard task for me to accomplish as to keep the fish relatively large I need to drastically cut the population, but by doing this I would be cutting the chances for success when I go fishing. As crappie fishing in ponds in southern Iowa is notoriously hard, unless the barometer is right or a front is coming through, maybe one day out of the week the crappies will bite, but when they do it is a feeding frenzy. There is one exception to this crappie rule though and that is if the population of crappies is overpopulated, or at the least very high. That’s why it will be difficult for my cousin and me to maintain a good population and yet keep that population at a large size. I’ll try to fish this pond again before ice-out and then see what happens to the crappies in the spring.