Kenny with an “e” fishing report

The Crappie Masters national qualifying tournament set for Lake D’Arbonne February 26 & 27 will be hitting the lake just about right. But the excitement won’t all be that weekend. The next few weeks there will be a lot of activity from tournament fishermen practicing as well as the regular crappie crew trying to get in on some of the late winter’s best action. The lake is steady at pool stage with just a slight fall from the earlier rains.

As a bonus for our readers, we’ll have some pre-tournament crappie fishing reports from Kenny Kavanaugh, who not only lives on the shores of the lake but also inside K&M Coffee, Corks and Camo in Farmerville.

Here’s this week’s Kenny with an ‘”e” fishing report .. (called that by Kinny with an “i”).

“We’ve been fishing a lot and it’s been slow for us in the mornings. It seems to pick up after lunch and then later in the evening it’s better. Of course, that can change, but right now it seems to be the pattern. We are fishing along the edges of the channel, right along with everyone else. We are sitting in 15-18 feet of water and fishing about 10-12 feet deep. That seems to be where the majority of the fish are. Nobody is catching any moving toward the shallows that I know of.

If you know me, my go-to color is orange so we’ve been doing good on orange and chartreuse jigs. Blue and chartreuse are also working. There are a lot of people spider rigging using shiners. It’s hard to beat shiners this time of year. The fish are still a bit finicky. We had several of them we were watching on the LiveScope and we would bounce the bait right in front of them and they would not bite. We’d finally drop it on their head a couple of times and they just swim away. Then, later in the evening, some of them would swim two feet to get it. There’s not a lot of real slabs being caught, but a lot close to two pounds. With this wind, people are somewhat hampered in where they can fish. You have to find deep water with some protection from the wind. But people are catching from one end of the lake to the other. It’s funny but you’ll see a long stretch with no boats, then 4-5 boats in one spot or 10-12 boats in one spot, then a long way with nobody fishing. That’s just D’Arbonne. It’s just getting better and better and it should be just right in about three-four weeks.

I’d like to remind folks that we are open from 4:45 a.m. until 8 p.m. and we’ve got everything you need! If you catch a super slab, bring it in and we will weigh it for you. Also, if you run out of shiners or need a bite to eat, give us a call, we’ll run it down to the boat dock for you so you don’t have to load up the boat. Check out their Facebook or webpage for more info and a menu!

** WARNING: Fishermen should take advantage of some of the great food at K&M CCC, but be careful. You might get so excited about all that good food that you forget your shiners — or worse — forget to even go back fishing!