Deep cranking kicks in

Bass, crappie fishing means finding deep structure

Mississippi fishermen have spent weeks dealing with temperatures that felt a lot more like late July than late May, which is why they’ve concentrated their efforts on summer fishing patterns.

For bass and crappie fishermen, that means concentrating on deep structure and deep cover.

“Deep cranking has been the ticket, something I don’t usually consider until at least July,” said Dan Smith of Ridgeland, who fishes for bass on a variety of private lakes as well as Ross Barnett Reservoir. “I had to go deep because I sure wasn’t finding fish on the usual May post-spawn areas. I went to a deep point on this one lake, found an old brush pile and my depthfinder lit up with fish.”

And with a Bandit 250, the new deep-running crankbait from the Sardis-based lure company, Smith quickly transformed those bass from pixels to reality.

“It was like bam, bam, bam… when I’d crank the 250 down and hit the top of the timber, I’d pause and they’d nail it,” he said. “One after another.”

The biggest was an 8.2-pound sow still skinny after ridding her belly of her eggs.

“Most of the action was 2- and 3-pounders and it was pretty darned steady,” Smith said.

On a nearby submerged road bed adjacent to a deep drop in the middle of Barnett Reservoir, crappie fisherman Gerald Thomas was scoring big on slab crappie dragging two other Bandit lures, the 200 and 300 series.

“I’m running into them in bunches,” Thomas said. “I will troll for 200 yards without picking up a fish and then get five or six off one 10-yard stretch. Then that slows and I go back until I hit another hot spot. If you run that old road out there, you’ll come across about six of my buoys out there. Those are the hot spots.”

Asked if he had tried to stop and jig those hot areas, Thomas laughed.

“No way, man. It’s way too hot to sit still,” he said.

Deep trolling crankbaits is also heating up at three of the north Mississippi lakes operated by the Corps of Engineers. Fishermen are having to sort through a lot of under-sized crappie to get a nice haul of 12-inch keepers.

“But, if you like action, we sure had it all weekend,” said Bill Robinson of Jackson, whose family spent the Memorial Day weekend camping and fishing at Sardis. “We ran the deep points and it was harder to not catch fish than to catch them. The trouble was finding the big ones.”

Other weekly news:

* Oxbow fishermen were disappointed over the long weekend and into this week, plagued by a fast-falling river that slowed bass, crappie and bream. Catfish action was good.

* Catfish reports remain steady, if not better. Jugging has been as hot as the weather, with shrimp and cut shad the best baits. Fishing over flats 3 to 8 feet deep in big lakes has produced a lot of keeper fish up to 10 pounds. Handgrabbers are entering the peak of their season.

* Stripers are easy to find feeding on the surface in Barnett Reservoir, but locating keepers over the 15-inch minimum is tough. “We slammed the little ones, and could have caught 100 of those 14- to 14 ¾-inch fish, but we wanted big ones,” said Wayne Bullock of Brandon, a tournament bass fishermen who spent Wednesday taking a youngster on his first bass boat trip. “Then we found this one school in front of Twin Harbors between the river and navigation channel that had a lot of 5-pounders in it. The action didn’t last long, but it was fun.”

* On the Gulf Coast, the focus remains on big speckled trout, which are plentiful after years of low fishing pressure first from Katrina and then from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. With little pressure on the fishery, including shrimp, near shore species like specks, reds, flounder and tripletail and increased in number. Capt. Scott Simpson of Impulsive Charters in Long Beach left those fish alone on Tuesday to fill a request for a family booking. “They wanted sharks and we got on them,” Simpson said. “It was a lot of hot action.”