SaltyCajun.com - 10-13-17 Hungry Calcasieu Crappie!!!

Around midnight I'm at work reading an article on specks thinking its my last graveyard of this stretch and I'm off til Monday so I can cut that grass Saturday. Well I didn't put the batteries on charge and not really prepared for a saltwater trip but aluminum rig with 25 Suzuki is just 2 miles from here on Calcasieu River on boat lift under dads house on goosferry rd. My relief shows up at 6 and I go to jean laffitte and grab 48 shiners and head back towards river. Take my time doing everything to give sun time to pop out and right around 710 I put my first shiner in the water. Bam! cork goes under. its a little bitty white perch. throw it in live well and caught 3 more just like it on same shiner before they finally got it. been a long time since I seen white perch eat dead shiners. Anyway these fish are small and I'm already thinking man where are the big ones like I used to catch. I know sometimes u have to get thru them little ones so bigger ones can get to it. Within 20 minutes or so I'm up to 8-9 of these little ones in live well. I set cork from 6 feet deep to about 7 feet deep and move out off bank out about 2 feet in different area of tree top which took me from about 8 feet of water to 10-12 feet of water. Bam! I think it hit it before cork ever touched the water cause as soon as I was letting it down it went straight down. these fish are hungry and its a a lot better fish. This is a really thick treetop so have to go straight down and straight back up. I must of lost a dozen fish. they would wrap around those limbs sometimes id get them sometimes not and other times popping my line instead of hook straighten out. Anyway I repeated this many more times for next couple hours, bite slowed down some but when I did get it and not get wrapped up they were just getting bigger and better fish. Finally when I put like # 25 or so in live well I thought about those little ones and was going to release some of them but had so many in small live well they were not alive and kicking very good. Lately I been filleting all of them but I'm gonna scale and just cut the heads off some of these. not as easy to eat but man it taste so much better frying and eating them whole like that. Around 10 am I finally used that 48th shiner and put #33 crappie in live well. best crappie trip of 2017! now had all of these been big it would of been like the old days back in the 90s when catching 25-30 of em and all would be 12"-15". My largest was in 1989 me and my aunt that had never fished em before caught 80 something and I caught my 19"er 3 pounder I had mounted. people would see it and think it was a bass at first, lol. Hurricane Rita destroyed that mount and my 44 pound red. Saved the 8 pound trout but its rough. Anyway this was a fun weird trip. Weird by the size difference. usually the little ones hang together and big ones school up with other big ones. But this is a good size treetop covering a big area. so weird how fishing for these u can move a foot one way or the other and not get a bite. few pics u may see wat I'm talking about. good luck all.