by John Phillips
The night was muggy. The big, thick, mushroom-shaped clouds allowed the moon only an occasional glimpse of our boat out in the middle of Lake Martin near my home.
Large swarms of gnats, mosquitoes and sometimes a mayfly circled the white beam from the Coleman lantern being cast into the dark water below. Often the heat from the lantern toasted the wings of the bugs, which were inhaled by swarms of shad as soon as they hit the surface of the water. We’d been fishing for three hours and only caught two or three small crappie.
“Sometimes the papermouths don’t turn on until 1:00 or 2:00 a.m. in the morning,” Randy Sharman, a fishing buddy of mine, explained. “But if and when the crappie start biting, we’ll take plenty of good-sized crappie. The fishing will be so fast and furious you can catch two crappie at a time.”
At 2:30 a.m., large numbers of slab-sized crappie began to school up under the light. We caught the fish from two feet off the bottom to two inches from the surface in the 15-foot deep water. Until the sun came up, the fishing was non-stop. I held the record for the most crappie caught on one minnow when I put my fifth fish in the boat and finally retired the bait. Four of us kept our limit of crappie that weighed between 1/2- and 2-1/2-pounds each. On most good crappie lakes, trips like this will occur frequently throughout the summer months.
To learn more about how to catch crappie during the hot summer months check out “Crappie: How to Catch Them Spring and Summer”, available in both eBook, print and audible formats http://amzn.to/WGaJLT.
