December Meet & Greet - Occoquan Crappie

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Today was the December Meet & Greet for the MKF forum.  When we met to organize the Meet & Greet schedule for 2013 back in January, I suggested that we have a Meet & Greet at the Occoquan for December...give the VA anglers a break from all the MD fishing locations that had been picked for the rest of the year.  The group thought that was a good idea, and further, they thought it'd be a good idea to have me host it too.  Doh!  Well, it wasn't that bad...all I was responsible for was picking a time, and picking a lunch spot.  We met at 8AM at the Occoquan Regional Park, and we were to have lunch at Dixie Bones BBQ at 1PM.

Leading up to today, the weather forecast was looking pretty grim...snow and ice were expected, but winds were supposed to be light, and the temperature wasn't going to be too bad.  But the chance of snow and ice was enough to keep most of the more careful anglers home.  Suddenly our attendance list of a dozen or so dropped to 4.  No matter!  I have fished in worse weather, and I wasn't going to back out as the host.

No snow! No rain! No wind!  Weather conditions couldn't have been better.

Luckily, the weather today was not bad, and I was pretty comfortable on the water until around when lunchtime came around, when I felt really cold.  I definitely have fished in worse conditions, and was glad to have been able to get out on the water today.  There were 5 of us from the forum that fished today, but I feel terrible as the host, as most people finished the day without a fish on the stringer.  I was the only one to go home with fish today.

The view from under the docks.

I started out fishing by the docks of the marina across the creek from the park.  The water level was pretty low today, which allowed me to paddle under the docks and navigate through the slips without risk of scratching up any of those nice boats.  I wasn't marking anything on my fishfinder and didn't get any hits on my chartreuse and red tube jig.  I gave up on the docks shortly after that, and went to the 95 bridge where I've caught most of my larger crappie at the Occoquan.

A technique I picked up from my friend Mike is to always have a line in the water.  He always catches fish on his fishing rod that's just sitting behind him with some kind of bait on it.  Today, I used some minnows that Ryan brought to share for today's fishing trip, and made sure to keep lively minnows in the water while I jigged with my lures.  This paid off once I figured out where the fish were.  When I was paddling around, I could see marks that looked like fish around 10 feet below the surface, so I used my fish finder to figure out how many cranks of the reel are required to get my minnow up from the bottom to 10 feet.  I would position the minnow at the right depth, and just sit it in my RAM rod holder.  I caught 4 of my 6 crappie of the day on the minnows.  The crappie weren't too aggressive with the minnows...every time I would only know I had a fish by observing the line moving away from me in the water.  The rod wasn't jumping or anything from the hits.

I had a lot of minnows, and I knew I wouldn't be needing minnows again for a while, so at one point I thought I'd try chumming the smaller minnows to try to draw the fish toward my line.  I think it might have worked...because I caught fish(twice) shortly after sending down the minnows.  By the end of the day, I had a stringer of pretty large crappie (for me), including a personal best size of 13 inches.  I think Ryan was the only other person to catch a fish, and I think he used the same technique that I used with the minnows.

Biggest bunch of crappie I've ever caught...

We all packed it up around 1PM and headed to Dixie Bones to eat some lunch and talk about fishing.  I love these Meet & Greets!  You fish, you eat, and you talk about fishing...  However, I hope not to host any Meet & Greets next year.  I'm a terrible host - the fishing was horrible today.  The fish played very hard to get, and the muddy <1' visibility water did not help.  On the bright side, I did have a cooler full of fish for tonight's dinner, and I think I'm starting to get better at interpreting the cryptic code that is displayed by my fish finder...today was my first time successfully using it to find and catch fish.

I'm also itching to get back to some saltwater....I would like to make a trip to the Norfolk area again soon.

An Almost Crappy Day

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What better way to spend the last day of 2012 than being on the water with some of your fishing buddies, right?  Well, Ryan and I were able to convince Mike to come out in the cold and join us for some crappie and possibly some catfish this New Year's Eve day.  The day before was super windy, so I thought "Whew!  We missed the bad weather, it should be a great day!"  But as I've seen on other occasions after windy days, the water was really low compared to the other times I had fished here in November.  It was so low that I was actually able to paddle under the docks at the marina across the river from the park.  I read a report from another angler on the Severn that the water was unusually low there too.  I'll have to keep that in mind next time I think about fishing after a windy day.

Low water level

It was cold, the water was low and muddy, and the fishing was slow.  However, all three of us were able to manage to catch at least one keeper crappie that day.  Ryan and Mike only had MD licenses, and the MD/VA reciprocity agreement starts at the route 95 bridge, so we started out by jigging the route 95 bridge pilings for some crappie, where we each caught our skunk saver fish.  However, none of us could manage to catch another after about an hour and a half of slowly moving around the pilings.  I tried the technique that worked for me last time, of dropping my jig down about 4 feet from the bottom and slowly paddling around the pilings.  I got a lot of hits this way, but only brought up one keeper crappie and a small one after that. 

Eventually, we moved on to try some of the other marinas that were out closer to the mouth of the river.  We all kind of split up and fished different areas.  Mike and I thoroughly fished different marina docks for a while, and Ryan tried soaking some minnows to wrestle up a monster flathead catfish.  Again, none of us had much success - except Mike did hook up with a 20 inch blue catfish on one of his gulp grubs.  We were split up, so I didn't get to grab a picture of him with the fish.  We then moved back to the bridge to see if things might have heated up, but I only managed one more keeper before we gave up.  Though the fishing was slow, and it was freezing, it was a great day on the water with my fishing buddies.

My unimpressive cooler of fish.  Thanks to Ryan and Mike for giving me their keepers!

Maybe I knew the day would be uneventful and needed something else to write about...or maybe the cold water did something to me...but while jigging the bridge I did something I thought that I would never do.  While starting my migration to the docks, I made some final attempts at jigging the bridge pilings in hopes of finally finding that huge school of slab crappies.  At some point I had a tangle at the end of my rod, so I tried to untangle it by shaking my rod to free the hook.  While shaking it over the side of my kayak, I just watched as my hand autonomously opened its grip on my rod and let it go...PLOP!  I let out a loud groan as I watched my less-than-a-year-old ultralight outfit go down into the depths of the river.

The last 2 times I fished the Occoquan I only brought my single ultralight rod with me to catch crappie.  By chance this trip, I brought a second rod with me to try for catfish if the crappie fishing was slow.  I didn't have a fishfinder with me, but I was familiar enough with the bridge area to know that I dropped it in the deeper part of the area.  It was going to be tough trying to somehow snag one of the guides of the rod or bail of my reel...but I had to try.  I was prepared to spend the rest of the day trying to snag it up - it was my favorite rod and reel combo!  I frantically dug through my tackle box to find the heaviest jig heads to use as a grapple to snag my rod.  I thought adding a treble hook to the ball of hooks might increase my chances of snagging my rod so I added an inline spinner to the end of my line.  I should have taken a picture of it, because it looked pretty ridiculous!

Jigging for my rod was proving to be difficult, and I was starting to lose hope.  Luckily, Ryan was nearby and offered to help find my rod.  He had some top-bottom rigs that he was using for catfish, and used a different technique to try to snag the rod.  He floated downstream a little, cast over the area where I made my stupid mistake, and reeled his rig in slowly to try to snag the rod.  After just a couple minutes, I saw him bring up a white and chartreuse grub - the same one I was using!  He had managed to snag my jighead and my rod along with it!  Wow, that was close!  Ryan saved my crappie day from being a crappy day....

Occoquan River Crappie

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Earlier this week, AbuMasgouf from the MKF forum suggested we try to coordinate our schedules to fish the Occoquan for some crappie together.  Since my trip earlier this week was not too successful, my wife was gracious to let me go once again.  My in-laws are arriving today too, so if I do well we can have fish for dinner - they would love that.

I took the OK Prowler today.

I met AbuMasgouf at the launch at 9AM and we were on the water by 9:30.  This was his first time fishing at the Occoquan, and also his first time fishing for crappie.  I'm only 2 trips ahead of him, so I didn't really have much insight to offer.  However, with all the knowledge we gathered from my past experience, some tips from other boaters, and from forum posts we wanted to see how we might do. 

First crappie of the day

We paddled across the river to the first marina we could find and hit up the docks to see what we might jig up.  I had my fishfinder today, so I was able to use it to determine the depths and kind of see where the fish are.  Within the first 10 minutes I hooked up with the first crappie of the day, and it wasn't a bad one at 10 inches.  I could tell today would be much better than my previous trip.

One of the large bluegills that were around

We stuck around the area for maybe and hour and a half or two hours.  We both hooked up with a couple more crappie and some monster bluegills.  AbuMasgouf caught the biggest bluegill I've ever seen...I think it was around 11 inches.  I also caught one that was almost as big.  Earlier in the morning the crappie seemed to hit the jig going sideways (cast and reel it in).  And the bluegills I caught were hooked when jigging vertically slowly near the bottom (Those bluegills seemed to give a better fight than the crappie).  However, after a while they stopped hitting the grubs and the fishing slowed.

I caught this guy at some point in the day

We decided to try some other areas, so we went off in search of more fish.  I paddled back and forth across the channel to try to find some fish on my fishfinder, but couldn't register any on the screen.  I later found out this was probably a bad way to find fish.  We paddled all the way to the last marina before the opening of the river, where I had had some success in the spring when I first tried for some crappie.  We still couldn't hook up with any there, and it was getting to be time for AbuMasgouf to head out so we went back to our original honey hole to give it one more shot before calling it quits.

On the way over, I met the boater that I had talked to on Monday, and asked how he was doing.  He was jigging by the bridge pilings, and he said he was doing awesome - he even just caught 8 decent sized crappie in the past 10 minutes.  What the heck were we doing wrong????  He held up his red and chartreuse grub and told us that the fish aren't hitting anything else.  Well, that stinks because I don't have any grubs in that color combination.  We thanked him for his advice and went back to the honey hole.  We jigged around for a good half hour before AbuMasgouf headed home.  I was determined to catch some more crappie, so I paddled back to the bridge to see if I could catch some more fish.

The largest of the day

While paddling to the bridge, I checked my phone to see if my wife had tried to contact me, and to check my e-mail.  I noticed that someone had responded to my thread on the MKF forum with some tips.  Basically, it said "The crappie are around every structure in the river.  The hard part is finding where the big ones are schooled up."  Every structure huh....I had mainly been concentrating on the open areas in the lanes between docks in the marinas.  I didn't fish too much directly next to the docks and piers.  I took this advice and the boater's tip and jigged my white-chartreuse grub right up against the pilings of the bridge.  On my first try I pulled up the nice 12 incher pictured above.  It's working!  For the next hour or so I slowly jigged my grub up and down next to the piling.  I also let the current drift me around to get the horizontal action in the grub.  Doing this got me hooking up with fish pretty regularly.  I ended up putting a few more keepers in my cooler by doing this.

Packed a little more than last time, but still pretty light

Around 3:00, I was getting tired from paddling around so I decided to head back in.  While packing up I met the boater again, and we talked about our day.  He mentioned that most of the day he was getting his hits by jigging up and down slowly near the bottom, and that he wasn't getting any hits by swimming his jigs.  That is pretty close to the experience I had today.  I'm glad that the pattern I used was also what another angler had used too.  He also gave me some tips about some locations where he said he consistently caught some 12-14 inchers...but I'll keep that to myself this time =).

Today's catch scaled and gutted

At home I cleaned the fish and wrapped them in foil to put some of them on the grill.  It turned out okay - I did it this way to avoid having to pull out the frying pan...but I wish I had pan fried them instead.  With the foil they came out more like steamed fish and I didn't season it well enough.  My parents-in-law still finished all of their portions though!

This guy's bigger than my son's head!

It was a fun day fishing for these panfish, and I met a new angler friend in AbuMasgouf.  I'm looking forward to getting back to the Occoquan to hopefully figure out the pattern earlier in the day to get into more fish.

Occoquan River

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It's Thanksgiving week, and my sister-in-law is visiting.  Now that my wife has help with watching the boys, she suggested that I take a fishing trip.  Isn't she great?  I considered going back to Kiptopeke for some togs, but I don't want to make that drive again so soon after the last trip.  I also wanted a relatively short trip, so that I could still spend some time at home with my family.  So in the end I opted to try the Occoquan river for some crappie.

The kayak launch at Occoquan Regional Park

Don't forget to pay the launch fee.  I got a ticket last time because I put my deposit in the wrong box.

I took my time getting out of the house, so I arrived at the launch around 9:30AM and launched at 10.  The water was calm, but there was a slight breeze that made it chilly and hard to stay in place for most of the morning. 

I think this is the lightest I've ever packed on a kayak.

The focus today was strictly to catch crappie.  I wasn't going to even try to catch anything else, so I only took my ultralight fishing outfit with me with two tackle containers for grubs and jig heads.  Today was also my Tarpon 100's maiden voyage.  It's a fun little boat.  Very maneuverable, very stable, and it has decent speed.  At one point I caught my paddle in a crack on a floating dock which put me in a weird position that rocked me pretty hard in the boat.  Maybe its wide hull makes it super stable.  Oh, because it's a bit wider than my Prowler 13, I did have to adjust my grip on my paddle a bit to get good strokes. 

My go-to perch rig.  I figured it would work for crappie as well.

For the next 4 hours, I fished all sorts of fishy places hard.  Shorelines with submerged trees, floating docks, piers, and bridge pilings.  I used 1/16 and 1/32 oz jig heads with small grubs that I typically use for white perch.  I figured crappie in the Occoquan probably have similar habits as summertime perch in the Severn.  Many times I got small nibbles, which I suspect were smaller crappie or maybe bluegills.  I managed to catch one crappie at 5 or 6 inches, and a largemouth bass at 7 or 8 inches.  Not much pullage, but it was good to see that the fish were there.  I'm planning to go again later this week with another kayaker - hopefully we'll have better luck then.

The fish that saved me from a skunk.

All the various jigs that I tried today.  The darker ones seemed to get more nibbles than the lighter ones.

Occoquan River

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My sister-in-law is in town from St. Louis this week, and I thought it would be nice to have a fish fry this weekend.  I had plans to fish the lower potomac for some catfish and possibly some croakers, which people have been reporting.  When I found out that Ryan from the MKF forum was fishing for catfish this weekend too, I asked him if he wanted to meet up and fish together.  He had to be in Virginia today, so he was going to check out the Occoquan river.  Since I have not fished the Occoquan before, I was open to trying it out with him.

The area by the shore launch.

I got to the Occoquan Regional Park at 6:00AM, paid my $5 non-resident fee for launching, and started rigging up my kayak.  Ryan arrived shortly after, and we were in the water around 7.  We shared our plans for the day, and we were going to jig for some crappie by the docks of the marinas south of the 95 bridge, and then soak some bait to try for some catfish.

After passing the 95 bridge, we started casting along the shorelines on our way to the marina to see if we could hook up with a bass.  That was unfruitful for both of us, so we went to the docks and started jigging.  Within the first several minutes, I was getting nibbles on my shad dart rigged with a 2" gulp minnow.  I thought maybe the minnow might be too big, so I swapped it out with a 2" tube.  2 casts later, and I caught the first fish of the day.  A 15" largemouth bass.  I tried jigging some more in that row of docks, but I didn't get any more hits, so I moved on.

First fish of the day.

In the second row of docks, I went back to my gulp minnow and tried vertical jigging with it.  After several tries, I get a hit...and it turns out to be a big old channel catfish.  I was trying to catch crappie, not catfish!  Well, the catfish was a pretty good size, so I put it on my fish stringer and tried again.  Several minutes later, I get another hit...and it turns to be an even bigger channel catfish.  I never got to measure it, but I would say it was pushing 20 to 22 inches.  Again, it was not a crappie, but I did want to catch catfish today...on the stringer he went.  I was starting to think that my jigging technique was somehow only attractive to catfish and not crappie.  A few minutes later, and I hook up with another catfish!  Unbelievable!  Oh, and all this time, these fish were being caught on my ultralight rod with 5 lb test braid.  It was actually kind of fun catching these large fish on light tackle.  I really wanted to catch some crappie, so I decided to move on and try the next marina.

On the way to the next marina, I trolled a small rattletrap crankbait to see if anything would hit it.  I was doubtful that it would work because of my failure to catch anything on a crankbait at the flats earlier this week.  However, halfway to the marina, I had a fish on my crankbait.  It turned out to be a small striper.  I forgot to snap a pic, but it was small...like 15 inches.

Ryan and I got to the next marina, and we tried jigging again for crappie.  Ryan was actually pretty successful - he was catching a lot of crappie on his small gulp minnows.  I asked about his technique, and it sounded like he was doing exactly what I was doing back at the previous marina where I was catching the catfish.  I thought maybe it was the location that turned me into a catfish magnet, so I tried the vertical jigging again....and...I caught another catfish.  Several catfish, actually.  I was getting a little frustrated at this point, because I wanted to catch crappie!  At one point, I hooked up with a BIG fish.  It wouldn't surface, and it actually dragged me out of the bay I was fishing in and into the next one before showing itself.  It was a huge blue catfish.  I was excited about catching such a large fish, so I went to stick my lip gripper in its mouth, and I guess his small teeth rubbed the line the wrong way, because the line broke.

I originally had a 6lb test mono leader on my 5lb braid main line.  I had snapped it somehow while landing one of the earlier catfish, and lazily just tied my jig head directly onto the braid.  I am pretty sure that abrasion from the rough surface on the blue catfish's mouth was what caused my line to fail.  Never again will I make that mistake.  He was huge...

Since it was time to retie, I thought of something else to try.  Last year, when I was perch fishing, I had some success using soft plastic grubs on a spinner arm.  I tried adding the spinner arm to the gulp minnow, and voila!  I was starting to catch me some crappie.  I went through several more of these docks to try to catch some crappie worth eating.  There were a couple white perch in the mix of fish that I caught too, which was a pleasant surprise.  Eventually (inevitably) I hooked into another catfish, and that was when I decided I was done fishing here.  Catfish are fun to catch on ultralight tackle, but it's also frustrating when you're not targeting them.

Ryan and I moved around, casting our lures to the shoreline to see if we could catch some more bass.  We both ended up catching a couple bass, but none that were impressive in size.  I caught mine on the gulp minnow, and on the rattle trap crankbait.  The gulp minnow is so versatile...it'll catch anything!

At this point, we slowly started making our way back to the launch and stopped by the 95 bridge to see if we could catch any catfish.  I didn't have any success there, so after a little while I parted with Ryan and I went back to the launch.  I was packed up and on my way home by 1.

My kayak and gear at the end of the day.

Fishing the Occoquan was interesting - it was a lot more fun that I thought it might be.  I also caught 6 species of fish today, which is pretty cool when you consider that they were all caught in the same body of water.  I brought home a few of the catfish, crappie, and white perch and cleaned them for tomorrow's fish fry!

Tomorrow's Dinner.