If you don't lose
your minnows, crappie bite all night long
Crappies
are about my least favorite fish to catch because you can’t catch them on a Zara
Spook or a Jitterbug or a Rapala Floating Minnow. You can only get a good fight out of them on four pound line
and a switch for a rod. But I had
some fresh crappie filets to eat this week despite the high water, fishing for
them only because I like to eat them on occasion.
Rich
Abdoler and I went out on the Friday evening before the Fourth of July and
fished for bass awhile. Didn’t
have much luck. I brought a minnow
bucket along with two-dozen minnows in it to use later for crappie. While bass fishing I set the bucket out
into the water, of course, to keep the minnows alive. Minnows are expensive, those cost me two and a quarter per
dozen. That’s almost 20 cents
apiece.
When
creeks and rivers are at normal stage, I can take a minnow seine and get about
60 minnows with two or three drags of that seine. Figuring the cost of them today at a bait shop, that is
twelve dollars worth of minnows in a few minutes. If you want to keep seining, I figure you can collect about
200 dollars worth of minnows in less than an hour. However, you can’t do that on swollen, muddy creeks.
In such conditions you might drown!
Be
that as it may, I bought the minnows and the boat gas and Rich didn’t
contribute anything. It all came
out of my pocket, and I guess because I owe him some money he figures giving me
more money is like throwing quarters in the lake, or even worse, comparable to
buying fireworks, which most likely is the biggest waste of money ever for us
grizzled old veteran outdoorsmen.
But
that isn’t important here, what is important is the fact that he is getting to
where he can’t remember what he ought to, and when I started the boat to leave
our bass fishing spot and go to the crappie fishing spot, he forgot that the
minnow bucket needed to be brought into the boat. So what happened was, the lid came open and we lost about
three dollars and twenty cents worth of minnows.
I
counted what was left and there were only eight or nine. Contemplating the loss of that kind of
money, enough to by a couple of bottle rockets or a whole pack of firecrackers,
I was really depressed. But we
went to a secret crappie spot as the sun sank behind a western ridge, a blood
red ball through the haze. You could actually see it move.
That’s
worth something. How many times
can you look right at the sun and see it slowly dropping into the darkness
while distant fireworks explode on the horizon in a variety of bright colors?
We
anchored, dropped the light into the water, and right off we began to catch
crappie. Rich caught two at one
time. What he did was, he tied a
jig about two feet above the hook with a minnow on it, and I’ll be darn if one
didn’t grab the jig just as one engulfed the minnow. Quickly, I caught a nice fat crappie and though I tried hard
to save that minnow it dropped into the lake as I hoisted the crappie into the
boat.
That
left seven minnows in the bucket, but I was fortunate enough to save my next
minnow through the landing of two hefty crappie. When I counted the minnows again I found that Rich, who is
not as conservative as I, had used two of them! Five left!!
I
was really mad at this point, at nothing in particular. It is just my luck that crappie would
be biting and two thirds of the minnows I had paid good money for had escaped.
Things
never seem to work right for me. I
was born under a dark cloud. As a
matter of fact, you will remember that a gosh-awful storm raged the night I was
born in that little Ozark farmhouse.
That night as I came into the world, lightning hit the old house my
grandparents owned and killed a couple of chickens in just the other room.
So
in time, there we sat… each one of us with the last two minnows, one
apiece. And you know, this is
strange, but we sat there for another hour and never got another bite! Even so,
we had several nice crappies in the live well, enough for a really big meal or
two, and that is worth at least ten dollars. Since I got to keep all the fish, I figure I came out okay.
As
I drove home that night, I thought about how bad I would have felt if we had
each caught great big nice crappies on those last two minnows and had none
left! But what would have
been worse is if we had not been able to catch any more fish at all on the last
three dollars worth of minnows.
In
such a case you have to just dump what is left in the lake, because they won’t
live long on a hot summer night.
But if you can get home and get your bucket in the refrigerator you can
keep minnows alive for a couple more days, even longer if you feed them crackers.
I
have done that a couple of times but Gloria Jean really gets mad about it. She doesn’t realize the economics of
it. What takes more room in a
refrigerator than a gallon of milk, which is worth only a couple of bucks? On occasion, I have set a bucket of
minnows in the refrigerator that was easily worth three or four dollars.
To
the readers of the magazines, the Lightnin’ Ridge Journal and the Journal of
the Ozarks, I apologize for the summer issues being late. We had a glitch at the printers and
they are being reprinted and will be mailed soon.
I
have a new publications director on board now and she says she will get things
straightened out and make the Lightnin’ Ridge magazines work like they ought
to, soon to increase the number of issues each year and get things working on
time. I’ll tell you more about her
soon if she can catch any fish.
In
the meantime, my new book, The Prince of Point Lookout, is doing well and if
you would like to get a copy send fourteen dollars to us and tell me who to
inscribe it to. The book is a humorous, factual account of my hunting and
fishing adventures when I left the Big Piney for the first time at the age of
seventeen to go to college at School of the Ozarks, down on Taneycomo
Lake. I now have nine books and I
told Ms. Wiggins to arrange a little brochure telling about all of them, plus
the two new ones I hope to publish this fall. If you’d like to get those little info sheets on my books,
write and let me know and I will send them to you. My address is Box 22,
Bolivar, MO
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