It
is a mystery perhaps, and perhaps not.
I will guarantee you this… there are more lures cast in these waters by
crappie fishermen than anywhere you will ever fish for crappie. The cables which hold those docks in
place hold as many crappie jigs, underwater and above, as some tackle
stores. If you go around looking
for lost jigs you will have enough to fish with for who knows how long.
I
was there fishing with Mike Dyer, who lives out in the woods twenty miles away
from the crowd. He fishes for
crappie a lot, right there in the shadow of the most development you will ever
find on a lake. It wasn’t a great
day for fishing, a cold front was passing through, and the temperature was
about 50 degrees with a heavy layer of gray clouds, and more wind than you
would want when casting 1/8 ounce jigs.
The water was pretty murky, downright muddy in some areas.
About
half the time we would catch and release both black and white crappie that were
from five- to eight-inches long.
That variety in size bodes well for the future of crappie fishing there,
meaning that two- to four-year old fish are plentiful and in the next couple of
years there will be plenty of nine- to ten-inchers that most fishermen keep and
eat.
I
think crappie fishing would be more enjoyable there if the length limit was
moved from nine to ten inches, but if that were to happen, the thousands of
dock owners and home-owners that are there might revolt.
Mike
doesn’t fish in the weekend crowds, but that day in mid-week, possibly because
of the weather, there weren’t many fishermen out there. We went from dock to dock, fishing
around them and between them, and hauled in our limits of crappie between 10
and 4 o’clock. If you counted the
ones we kept and those we threw back we likely caught a hundred between us, and
Mike doesn’t keep one if it isn’t well above that nine-inch mark. He knows what he is doing, often
bending his rod tip nearly double and holding the jig in his right hand, then
releasing it so that it flips well into a dock slip or well past and beneath
the cables that are everywhere.
The
crappie were found almost everywhere from three feet of water to ten feet of
water, bunches of them.
Occasionally we would hook a big bluegill too.
With
all that development, there has always been the question of water quality,
especially with coli form bacteria.
But polluted water doesn’t always hurt crappie meat unless it is a type
of chemical pollution. Water you
wouldn’t want your kids to swim in isn’t necessarily going to taint crappie and
bass.
There
is no doubt that hundreds and hundreds of boat docks have helped the crappie on
lake of the Ozarks because most of them have some cedar tree structure put
there around and beneath the docks by owners who like the idea of catching fish
beneath their docks. Just the docks themselves are attractions for fish. When the sun gets high and hot in July
and August, the shady water beneath a dock, if it is deep enough, attracts
fish-food and crappie.
Mike
says that he will fish for crappie there for the next couple of weeks, but he
won’t be found there after the Memorial Day weekend. The giant boats and on the water parties found from Memorial
Day through the summer create giant waves and danger for small boat fishermen. But it is likely that next fall the
crappie fishing there will be great.
A
caution to all fishermen. If you
are coming in off the water, or even hauling your boat home and have fish in a
cooler or live well, you must have the fish you have caught marked. You can easily do it with a small pair
of scissors. Three fishermen? One
fisherman does nothing to his fish, another marks his fish by clipping the top
of the tail fin, while the third marks his by clipping the corner off the
bottom of the tail fin. Do this as
the fish are caught. The agents of
the Missouri Department of Conservation, waiting in MDC vehicles at boat ramps
have found this to be an easy way to write citations with very little work in
the field or on the water. Don’t
be a victim of such a senseless rule.
Even if you only have four or five fish in a live well, and there are
two or three fishermen, they can and do write tickets that will cost all of you
a hundred dollars or more if each fish is the same and YOU CANNOT PROVE WHICH
IS YOURS!
Write
to me at box 22, bolivar, mo 65613 or email lightninridge47@gmail.com. You can
call our office at 417-777-5227.