Jeff Sundin Fishing Report MN June 5, 2019 “Panfish Action Heating Up – Timing Sping Crappie Runs”
Category: fishing reports
Jun 9th, 2019 by Keith Worrall 513
Modified Jun 9th, 2019 at 9:38 AM
North central Minnesota’s better panfish lakes are filling with boats as anglers hurry to get in on the spring crappie run.
Surface water temperatures now range from 61 to 66 degrees, already at or beginning to enter ideal range. Depending on how far advanced the surface water temperature of your favorite lake is, crappies are likely already on spawning beds, or at least they will be very soon.
Over the past couple of days, Dick and Paul have watched me look over a lot of shoreline cover. Some of it was completely un-inhabited by panfish and some of it was just barely populated. But in some of the territory, like the area we checked on Tuesday, crappies were fully engaged in the spawning process.
On this particular trip, it was difficult to learn what stage of spawning the fish were in. The lake we fished has dark coffee stained water and outside conditions were dark too; there was a chop on the surface that made visual contact with the fish tricky. So trial and error was about the only way we could find them.
We located the fish by creeping along the edges of shallow cover, fan casting to all of the territory we could reach. At any given time, we theorized about precisely where the fish were, but we were almost never exactly right. Sometimes we’d catch a fish right up in heavy bulrushes and become fixated on that. Then one of us would catch one out in the open, over rocks or cabbage weeds; then we became fixated on that. The rule of them was that covering fresh territory, albeit slowly, was critical.
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