Summer fishin’

The picture above shows Nick Palentino from the Windy City with a 16-inch crappie, caught July 8 at Rend Lake. Summer crappie fishing has slowed considerably but great numbers are still being caught.

You gotta stick and move untill you get active fish.  All depths of the water column can be effective.  Jigs are producing fish but always carry your minnows along. 

Catfish are being caught. Try cutbait on mainlake flats and channels. 

Bass are all over the place as well.  They can be caught flippin plastics shallow but the most consistent bite is on the rocks where they are moving in and out.  Crankbaits and shakeyheads will work.

The night bite is on at most of our other lakes bass can be had on dark colored plastics and black spinnerbaits.  Lake Egypt is the place to be for the best night bassin’.

Night-time bass and big crappie

Fish all over southern Illinois are cooperating rather well.

First of all, the Lake of Egypt night fishing is going crazy. Black single-bladed spinnerbaits and big worms are good and dark-colored shaky heads and senkos are also working. You can catch them down there during the day on Carolina rigs.

At Crab Orchard, there’s a a good bite for bass on buzzbaits and spinnerbaits in the grass in the evening.

But the best of all are the crappie on Rend Lake. They are better than excellent. We’re catching big numbers of big fish. Most of them are in 8-15 feet on minnows and shad-colored jigs. You can fish brush, stumps or stakebeds. I’ve never seen the numbers of crappie and big crappie that we’re seeing now.

I was talking to the biologist Mike Hooe and I told him, “Dude, your program is working.” A 12-incher here will weigh a pound every day of the week and we’ve caught several 2-pounders. This is the best year I’ve had here in awhile.

Bass at Rend Lake are OK on main lake points on crankbaits and in the bushes on spinnerbaits and dark-colored beaver baits or pocket craws. There’s also a pretty good frog bite if you can find grass.

Crappie on fire at Rend Lake

I just got off Rend Lake with one of the biggest messes of crappie I’ve had in months.

Crappie down here are on fire.

You can catch them in the bushes, on laydowns, on sets in the middle of the lake and just about anywhere you want to fish. I can go out every day and pummel them and some of them are 14-16 inches long.

Right now I would rate the crappie on Rend as better than excellent.

And the bass are good all over, too.

They had the Paralyzed Veteran’s tournament last weekend and there were lots of limits. The bass are shallow and you can catch them on brush hogs, spinnerbaits and pocket craws.

Lake of Egypt bass are good too and the crappie there are in the grass. But we’re fishing Rend right now and it’s good. Come on down.

Southern Illinois Grand Slam

We’ve got some guys down here from Joliet and they got into a real Southern Illinois Grand Slam.

They killed some turkeys. They caught a mess of crappie on Rend Lake. They found morels. And they found wild asparagus.

Last night we cooked morels, asparagus, crappie and ribeye steaks and today we got the turkeys. Man, it was awesome. Those birds were cutting up all over. They were really gobbling good.

And fishing down here is good. Everything is so far ahead of normal. You can already catch crappie in the bushes at Rend Lake. That’s about two weeks early. Todd is still catching them deep, but you can get them shallow in the bushes, too.

I can tell you this: now is a good time to be down here.

Crappie, redear and asparagus

We had having fresh crappie, redear and asparagus for dinner. It’s a good day.

We went over to DuQuion City Lake and caught a 5-gallon bucket full of bluegill, redear and crappie. We had 18 of the biggest redear I’ve ever seen out of there. They were 10-13 inches and fat.

We just pulled into the lilly pads and started whacking them. Those crappie were real shallow and had black bellies. The big ones haven’t made it there yet, but we had some that were 12 inches long or so.

And we found asparagus today, too. I saw two stalks that had already bloomed, so they must have been out for a week already. That’s as early as I can remember finding it. We found about 15-20 stalks. I’d say in another week they’ll be completely ridiculous.

We found a few white morels too, but it will be a few more days before my honey holes really turn on.

As for crappie, I’d fish Lake of Egypt or DuQuion City Lake for them right now. And almost all the bass are spawning at Lake of Egypt.

It warmed up so fast this spring that everything seems to be happening early.