Noah Fishing Middle Grove

After Church, Noah and I headed out to my uncle's new 50 acre lake near Middle Grove. My uncle's Mike and Spark have a small farm out that way and just a few months ago the property adjoining theirs went for sale and they ended up buying it. Anyhow, ever since closing about a month ago I have been licking my chops to get out and check out all this new water and today we finally made it happen!

So we decided to see if there where any crappie in the lake. We bought some live minnows from Andersons Outdoor Supply right there in Middle Grove and decided slip bobbers along with some tube jig casting would be our game plan.

My first question when pulling out the boat ramp was if there were any beaver dams on the lake. Spark points over my shoulder and here we are on a 1.5 mile long lake and our first beaver dam was only 30 yards away! Jackpot!! Our first cast in front of the beaver dam and a huge bass swallows our bobber completely.

2 minutes later and Noah is pulling the first of many very large bass:





Catching the bass was a nice and fun bonus to crappie fishing, but we wanted to find some crappies and we couldn't keep the bass off our baits. Anyhow we finally connected with a couple crappies from the first beaver dam and they were NICE!




One thing about crappie fishing is when they are actively feeding I keep my baits up in the water column, but at this first spot they were not actively feeding so we had to keep our baits low to get bit. As the fishing slowed down at the first spot decided to go scope out the rest of the lake.

We moved around the lake watching the depth finder and the shoreline for good fishing spots and we didnt catch much until we found another beaver dam about 1 mile from the first. There we connected with some more nice bass and a couple more crappies:






We caught a bunch of regular bass too, they weren't all monsters.




This one was though. We weren't even bass fishing, just trying to catch crappies:



So, its the end of the day and we decide to head all the way back to the end of the lake just to check it all out. We get back there and it gets pretty narrow and starts to get shallow in the end. This is where we look over the edge of the boat and we are staring at crappies in the water right below us! In a deep strip mine lake, relatively shallow water is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

As fast as you could put your minnow down, a big crappie would slurp it up! Very nice ending to a great day of fishing!! Can't wait to get back out there and do some more exploring!!!