Alum Creek Suageye and Crappie

Saturday night after the tournament I was beat. Getting up at 3:30 in the morning is something I rarely do. It is more likely that I stay up until that time.

When I got home from the tournament and put the boat in the garage, Christina said that we should have a family movie night so I picked out some DVD's that were kid appropriate, sort of. Leo picked out The Hulk from the group so we sat down to watch it. The recliner sucked me in and after 15 or so minutes it was Z time. I woke up at the end of the movie and went to bed at 9:30 on a Saturday night. At 9:00 the next morning I awoke.

Gene was sleeping on the couch. Instead of waking him up in a conventional way, I got a dog toy and got Kimber's dog Hunter to jump up on him and run back and forth across him. Gene finally opened his eyes and we started to get the boat ready.

His brother Glenn wanted to go so we invited him along.

Once at Alum Creek we boated to a regular bass spot to try for some bass and the possibility of a bonus musky. Glenn hooked into the first fish on a nightcrawler he was dragging along the bottom behind the boat. When he got it to the boat we realized it was a saugeye, about a 17 incher. He took it off the hook and chucked it back in the water. Gene and I looked at each other then let Glenn know that he could have kept that fish. Glenn said he had never caught a saugeye before and didn't know they were good eating.

Gene hooked into the next 2 saugeye, a 16 and a 17 incher, with a Rapala Extreem Shad. We anchored the boat and rigged up worms to try to catch some more. It had been raining and a thunderstorm was approaching. The wind picked up and even in the tree surrounded cove the wind was blowing hard. Rain started pouring down. It was a quick passing storm. The fish stopped co-operating in that cove so we went to try the next cove over.

In the next cove we tried several areas with hardly any luck. Glenn cuaght a small catfish on his worm. I think most of the time we were moving the boat around trying to get those 2 out of snags. Finally we started making our way back out of the cove. I had saw a couple small swirls in the back of the cove and started using my tiny dancer as I thought they were crappie swirls.

A couple guys came down on the bank and started casting bobbers and minnows into the water. They asked if we had caught any crappie. I answered no and at that time Gene was hung up in a laydown again. We pulled over to the laydown for Gene to free his lure and I cast neer the structure and pulled out a crappie. I ended up catching about 50 crappie in that spot. There were a lot of small fish but I pulled out a few 10 inchers to keep. Gene was using the same thing and only managed to pull out 1 crappie. It was a slab measuring about 13 inches and made my 10 inchers look tiny.

That spot dried up after a while and Gene and Glenn wanted to try for some more saugeye so we made our way back to the first cove. We worked it all the way to the back of the cove and I found another crappie spot where I pulled out about another 50 crappie. This time only 2 keepers. Glenn pulled out a couple small bass and Gene finally catching a few crappie.

At one point when Glenn had snagged on the bank, Gene had pulled the boat to the bank to free the lure. We were next to a fallen tree in the water so once Gene got the lure I used my foot to push off the roots of the tree to get us back out away from bank. The roots were rotted and broke under the force causing me to lose my balance. I fell trying to make it back in the boat. Instead of falling outward or into the boat I fell straight down. My left leg made it in the water up to the knee before the trolling motor finally caught me right in between my legs. It stopped me from going into the lake but I don't know if it was worth it.

I sat down for a little bit recovering while Gene and Glenn had a good chuckle.

We tried one other spot for a while before giving it up for the day around 6:30. By the time we left we were all cold and soaked.