How To Fish Blog! | How-To-Fish.us

speckled bass

Old School Crappie Fishing Family Secrets

the crappie is a very sought after species of fish which goes by many different names through out the countrysuch as calico bass,speckled perch,speckled bass,white perch,pole crappies,strawberry bass, and papermouths. The water temperature during the pre-spawn period is typically between 50 degrees farenhieght to 63 degrees farenhieght. During the pre-spawn period paper mouths are changing their daily patterns getting ready for the upcoming spawning period.

 During the pre-spawn period the crappie,calico bass are searching for good spawning grounds to have their young. They require a solft, but not to mucky bottom because the males will be sweeping out the nest from time to time. The soft bottom needs to be close to cover which could be stumps, fallen trees, brush piles, reeds, or stalks that are at the appropriate depth for spawning.

 The proper depth for spawning is determined by the water clarity where the crappie,calico bass are located. The clearer the water the deeper speckled perch must go to spawn. In extremely clear lakes this may be at depths up to 20fett deep. In speckled perch waters that have average clarity, typically speckled perch spawn in depths of 3 to

What’s it like to fish during one of Key West’s coldest February’s ever? Captain Craig Eubank of the Mr. Z tells the fishing tales of the last week:

With the unusual cold fronts this year, the water temperature drop in the Gulf of Mexico has made the birds out of the barracudas … snowbirds, that is.

The big ‘Cudas that usually live on the WWII wrecks and big shoals move further South into the Atlantic Ocean and congregate on the reefs and wrecks. They’re definitely hungry after that long swim, and lucky for them, we have plenty of baitfish waiting!

How do we find ‘em? We look for “showering” Ballyhoo — that’s the baitfish moving as one pack, “tailwalking” across the water to avoid a predator. It looks as though you just turned on the sprinkler in the backyard.

Some days we run ‘em twice.

Our early morning anglers last Friday did show up pretty much on time, and after closing down the bars on their Duval Crawl at 4 am, that was no small feat!  We found pretty rough conditions with green water and a bitter wind out of the North – bitter for Key West, that is. It’s still tropical here – the