WOOD COUNTY, Texas — The lazy, hazy days of summer. The average hottest temperatures, the lightest wind. That all can be a disaster for fishing guides who want their clients to catch fish.
But as we found out in a recent Hooked On East Texas, the fish will bite if you know how to take the right approach. CBS19 headed out to the beautiful Lake Fork for a dog days of summer fishing trip with well-known crappie guide Jacky Wiggins.
He wants to clear up one misconception about crappie fishing.
“There's no seasons on crappie. There's just different patterns for different areas in different places. We fish for the time of year, but they bite all year long, somewhere on the lake in some depth. Some pattern you're gonna find the crappie somewhere," Wiggins said.
We found fish in about 14 to 22-feet of water. We’re using forward-facing sonar. We can easily see the trees and we can tell which fish are crappie and which are catfish or bass.
“We're actually going after the needle in the haystack, not just fishing the haystack," Wiggins said.
The crappie are gathered around a tree. Bait fish are abundant here and the shade of the tree makes the water a little cooler.
“The pattern right now is fish grouped up looking for shade on on brush piles on timber on lay downs, you'd think bridges, but they're not on the bridges right now for some reason," Wiggins said.
We used live bait, minnows and targeting big white crappie. They’re typically a more aggressive. They’re not hitting artificial baits. They’ve become finicky eaters, according to Wiggins.
“Over the last two weeks, we've noticed that there finicky and getting more and more and more. And we've had to actually go from jigs over to minnows. We had a good bite for the jig all spring and all early summer. But we finally have gotten into that true dog day of summer bite," Wiggins said.
They might be picky, but they can’t resist the live bait. We reel in a couple of one pound plus slabs. Big fish are fine but we want numbers; we want our daily allowed limit of 25 crappie.
We try and fill up our cooler with black crappie. We find large groups of back crappie using fish finders, but that doesn't mean they will bite. If you don’t have a fish finder or don’t like electronics, look for points or areas where shallow water is near deeper water. And look for natural signs pointing you to fish.
“Some sort of indicator that, you know, this kind of helped you to look for that maybe birds. We see some cormorants every now and then they're diving down eating shad. But in that area, you might find one or two trees that are just loaded. So, they're absolutely loaded," Wiggins said.
But knowing the fish are there doesn’t make them bite. In the end, the sun, the heat and light wind added up to what we expected, but it wasn’t disappointing.
“I kind of expected some black crappie today; we had a slow bite and the black crappie didn't want to cooperate at all. We caught some white crappie. The bite was a little bit slow early, picked up later. And it's about typical right now," Wiggins said. "We're catching 30 to 50 fish a day and we didn't fish the whole five hours like we normally do. Twenty fish is a decent day -- so just decent summertime numbers."