Sweet revenge

Revenge on the water is sweeter than a fresh fried crappie filet on the plate. Well, that might be debatable.

You may not believe it, but noted crappie expert Rick Hill and I went fishing on Lake D’Arbonne one day this spring and we did not catch a crappie. Not only that, we didn’t get a bite. Four hours. Nothing.

I promised Rick I wouldn’t tell, him not wanting to damage his reputation and all for not catching any fish and especially for letting me tag along. But you know fishermen never tell the truth. It was just one of those days. The pressure was rising, the lake was still. Not a turtle on a log, not a minner flicking anywhere, the squirrels were even asleep….things were just dead.

But we got even.

Not too many days ago, we went back, determined to right that wrong. And we did get even. We found crappie in four or five places and kept enough for a neighborhood fish fry. We caught them on a variety of jigs, mainly because Rick doesn’t bring shiners in his boat. Oh, you can bring some, but he’ll keep you backed into low hanging cypress limbs where you get to see things eye to eye with cottonmouths and early spring wasps and things like that.

But seriously, Rick’s a great fishermen and I count it a blessing when we get to go together. We have fun with full or empty livewells. I have to admit, it is more fun with a full one.

On our most recent outing, we spent about as much time playing as fishing. Rick has one of those fancy new LiveScope depth finders and we spent quite a bit of time looking for fish on the screen. And we saw them. It’s amazing that you can even use them to spot fish in shallow water. That doesn’t mean you can catch them, but you can spot them.

Where it really came in handy was going down a section of open looking lake bank where there were long stretches of no fish. But then, you’d see a group on the Live Scope and just about every time we spotted fish, we sent out baits to check things out and they brought crappie back to the boat.

Sweet. And so were the filets.