This is a trip we love to make every year. Catching crappie through the ice is one of our favorite winter activities, but we don’t have a lot of opportunity for large numbers of crappie out of the boat in the summer. One of the things that is fun about panfish is the size of the gear. We use mirco and ultra light rods and 2 to 4 lb line when fishing for these small giants. Mary and Gordon came with us and we put in at Toungue Tuesday evening around 5pm. We started at our usual spot, an island near the dam. After striking out on the crappie there we moved over a few bays and fished some private docks. We found some schools of crappies relating to one dock and started catching a few 10″-12″ fish. A rainstorm moved off the mountain and rained on us for about 45 minutes so we put the rain cover up on the boat and jigged vertically in 18′-23′ of water during the storm. We ended the evening keeping 14 crappies and two nice perch. We threw back some smallmouth bass and the smaller crappies. At 6:30 a.m. we were back on the water. No luck everywhere we tried except for back around the docks, where we fished till 11:00 catching more crappies, smallmouths and a bonus walleye. It was a fun trip!
