Terry Stewart had a lot to brag about this week after the day he and his dad had Saturday (Dec. 8) in the Magnolia Crappie Club tournament at Eagle Lake, which they won with a 7-fish limit weighing 15.05 pounds.
But instead of crowing about their victory, Stewart was singing the praises of the old oxbow lake that has made a giant turnaround.
“You know how good Eagle Lake used to be when everybody thought it was the best crappie lake in Mississippi, well its back,” said Stewart, of Jackson, the MCC’s tournament director. “I don’t know what happened over the last decade but the fishing had gone down considerable. It got so bad that people really quit fishing it.
“Eagle was always a place you could go in the fall and winter and troll for giant white crappie and catch all you wanted. That’s what it was known for and that’s what we found last week.”
Through two days of practice and then on Saturday, Stewart said the fishing was as good as ever on Eagle, about 20 miles north of Vicksburg. So much so that most of the club chose it over the other option; nearby connected oxbows Chotard and Albermarle.
“Eagle was really, really good, all three days,” he said. “We had the option of the other lakes, and my wife (his usual club partner, Tonya) and I went to Chotard and tried it the weekend before. We caught some fish. We caught a lot of fish. But, those fish were poor. They weren’t in as good a shape as the ones at Eagle.
“Seems like this extended time with the Mississippi River being so low and out of those lakes, it has really hurt. Chotard and Albermarle are as low as I have ever seen them and I think the game fish have done a number on the shad population. They really need the river to get back in there and replenish the food base.”
A lot of fishermen say that the river is what led to Eagle Lake’s sudden turnaround, pointing to the massive flood of 2011.
“That would be my guess,” Stewart said. “I know a lot of the locals say it has to be what led to the white crappie coming back. All I know is that a few years ago we weren’t catching any and now everybody is catching them again.” David Thornton, a former MCC tournament director who lives at Eagle Lake, agrees. “Eagle is on fire,” said Thornton, who along with neighbor Shelton Culpepper finished third with 14.77 pounds.
“We started seeing those white crappie last fall and winter, but not like this. You can catch them jigging or trolling, on the piers or in open water. Right now, it doesn’t really matter which way you want to fish, you can hammer them. We’re starting to see the big specks (black crappie) moving up on the piers and that will only get better as the cold weather comes on, but at the same time the white crappie are hard to ignore. They are back and you can catch them.”
The Stewarts caught their winning fish trolling with minnows.
“We caught them between 10 and 18 feet, starting out at 10 and 12 feet early before the sun came up,” he said, holding back on the location since the club is returning to the lake in January. “Then as the sun started getting high, the fish went deep and we finally figured it out and adjusted.
“I’d recommend that if you try that pattern over there, you need to adjust throughout the day. That’s especially true if the high pressure continues. We caught them good Saturday morning before 9:30 and then we thought they quit biting or moved on us. After talking to other people, I realized that they just went deeper. They didn’t leave the area; they just went deeper. We eventually adjusted and started catching them again.”
Other patterns were working, too.
“Man, right there near us, we saw people long-lining with jigs and they were catching fish,” Stewart said. “And we had people right there who were trolling with crankbaits. Everything was working. And when I say everything, I mean there were people who didn’t do anything but sit on one or two piers all day, and they caught fish.
“And everybody was catching big fish. The top 10 teams all caught over 14 pounds, which is a two-pound average. And we had a lot of 13-pound limits after that. For the first time in a long, long time every team that fished weighed in a limit.”
The average 7-fish limit weighed 11.48 pounds, and the average fish weighed pushed 1.78 pounds. It took 13.5 pounds to get a check.
“I’d say Eagle Lake is back,” Stewart said. “And then some.”
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