Crappie fishing 101 at Lake Hodges
Lake Hodges is one of the first lakes in the Southern part of the state to go off! However, these are not spawning crappie in shallow water around some kind of structure. These are pre spawning Crappie on the move in a flat area. So anchoring off of some kind of structure, won't get you very far on this kind of fishing! We went to Lake Hodges on Opening weekend and we did "OK" on some really nice size Crappie. If you're planning on going there and it's new to you, "pay close attention to what I'm about to say" or this place will eat you alive with an epic disaster!!! The kind of fishing going on right now, "is similar to run and gun tuna fishing around some dolphin!" (think like that and you will do OK!)
The true pro's on these Crappie are the state of the art Kayaks! No I'm not talking about some flimsy kayak, with someone paddling with a double sided paddle. But with a state of the art propulsion system with super High Tech electronics! My friend told me his friends kayak cost him over $9,000 dollars! They have this super fish finder with fish scope technology, costing as much as $3,000 bucks! What they do is paddle around as a group and one someone finds a school. They all fire on them together and make a catch! We will call them the Dolphins!
So as we loading our rental boat, we notice a herd of Dolphins just motoring around the Launch ramp. What the heck are these Dolphins doing out there, I ask my friend? I thought you said all the action was happening in the Narrows! (he was there on Wed in the Narrows) He called his buddy who was out there and said their catching some Crappies. So we went out there and started drifting, while we were watching these guys reeling in some Crappies. His buddy's got bored and headed back to the Narrows, where they caught some Crappies on Wed. My buddy wanted to follow them and I said, "don't you dare!" Number one rule in fishing is, "you don't leave biting fish to find fish!" They will call us, if they get bit in the narrows! In the mean time, we are going to fish these fish. After not catching anything for a while, we asked one of the Dolphins who was catching. What depth are you getting bit at? He said, "14-20 feet." We had brought the whole kitchen sink to throw at these Crappies. I had and got bit on, Live minnows under a slip bobber, a Cachuma white jig, a green grub and an under spin. My buddy got bit on Live minnows with a split shot and an ugly green Walmart Crappie jig. He ended up getting 7 bites on his ugly Walmart special lure.
So after observing where to the Dolphins were getting bit at. We now started drifting in a small boxed area of the lake. We were mostly lazy fishing by just dead sticking our baits. Since the fish were in kinda of a small area, it was just a matter of time before we started getting bit! We were just bumping into them by drifting. Our $100 fish finders, weren't much help in finding the fish! We just ran into them by accident, because we were staying in the zone. My friends buddy's died like pigs in the Narrows. One boat caught 1 Crappie and the other $9,000 kayak caught 3. We did a lot better then that in our rental boat, because we fished them like Tuna.
If anyone wants to give Lake Hodges a try now. Look for the Dolphins and fish in the 14-20 range! If you got a good Crappie lure, they will probably bite it! It's more just staying in the zone and the right depth now. Good Luck for anyone who wants to go!
