Got Out Yesterday

Like them cold water crappies!

Try using a smaller jig head this early in the year. If the surface water temps are only in the 45 Deg F range there is still not a lot of life in the water yet. it will get better as the waters warm up. It's still March.

Also try some Crappie Nibbles or other scent attractants when using jigs.  The soft tube can be stuffed with crappie nibbles or other scent that make the crappie hang onto the bait a bit longer giving you time to lift the rod up and set the hooks.  Shad Scales by Johnson and the Bobby Garland Scents will help you catch more fish.

Wash your hands with plain old IVORY Soap while fishing or right before fishing especially if you get gasoline on your hands when filling up the boat gas tank or the vehicle gas tank. Some guys go so far as to wear plastic or rubber gloves when filling up with gasoline. The smell of gasoline or other petroleum products can turn the fish off FAST.  So wash your hands.  That's probably why the Misses out fish most guys. The guys are filling up the gas tank and the women's hands stay free of strong gasoline scent and thus they often catch more fish than the men.  Now you know why!. 

Jigs hanging under a small float that matches the weight of the jig are great tools to use. Still it helps to apply scents to the baits to help entice the fish to bite.  Some of the largest parts of a fish's brain is devoted to smells.  That should tell us all something important.

I sometimes add a minnow to the jig and a crappie nibble too. Try everything . Small jigs and larger jigs. Change up colors too.

Bee moths and or crickets can also be added to a plain hook and used to catch spring crappie and bluegills too.

If you take the crappie nibbles out of the jar and lay them out in the sunlight for about 15 minutes they will harden up. The skin on the outside of the crappie nibbles gets hard enough to help them stay on the hook better/longer. That's the key to using them. Also there is a device called the "Bait Pump" that you can purchase and use to squirt the crappie nibbles into the tube jigs and that really helps them stay in the bait longer. It's like a huge syringe devise with a larger opening that the soften up crappie nibbles will pass though and into the tube jigs hollow area.

I swear by scents on my artificial baits. Scents are so powerful that in the Smokey Mountains they are OUTLAWED. I was fishing near Elkmont once and the game warden came out to check me. They checked to make sure that I was using barbless hooks on my fly's and that I didn't have any scent on the fly. The game warden tried to smell my fly to make sure that it was not covered in scent. I got lucky as I had used some Dr. Juice on the fly that day earlier but I guess he could not smell it so he didn't give me a ticket. That day the trout were after something very tiny in the surface of the water. The area between the air and the water. I'm still not sure what those huge trout were feeding on that day. I stood up on the roadway along the outside edge of the creek channel and could see them sipping the subsurface of the water and feeding on something so small that I could not see it in the water. But they were definitely feeding on something. I mean these were huge trout. The water was about 20ft deep on the outside edge of the creek and there were boulders in the water as big as cars. It was a sight that I will remember the rest of my life. The ranger station was not more than 3/10ths of a mile nearby. I didn't know that at the time. I never could figure out how to catch these trout but I bet that thousands of other fishermen had tried to catch them without success. The scum had some type of insect in there that they were keying on. But if anything would have worked it would have been some Dr. Juice Trout formula. Unfortunately I had the Dr. Juice Bass Formula.

Now when I fish for Largemouth Bass and use the Pheromones in the Dr. Juice Bass Formula I catch three times as many fish as without the Dr. Juice. So I'm a firm believer in using scents on my artificial baits. Otherwise I use live bait when crappie fishing. Minnows, Bee moths etc are my go to baits.  Crappie nibbles and Dr. Juice or Shad Scales or the other fish formulas are the key to getting the fish to hang onto the baits a little bit longer.