Finding Feeding Fish

We as anglers are always looking for information about how the fish are biting and where they are biting the best. I had heard that a small local pond was producing a decent crappie bite and the size of the fish wasn’t bad as well.

Having some information as to the area these fish were using, I started drilling holes and marking fish right away. When searching for feeding fish, typically start out with one of the Clam Outdoors spoons and seeing how the fish were reacting to these presentations.

After seeing many fish come in and look, then back off, I could determine that these fish were on a finicky bite and needed a different approach. This is where having many rods rigged with different baits comes into play as tying jigs and spoons on in the winter, can be very cold on your hands at times.

Switching to a Clam Outdoors Half Ant jig, taking the Maki Plastics Mino XL, cutting the fatty piece off the head and threading the remaining tail portion onto the jig’s hook. Back to work on these fish and no matter where I fished in this area, these fish were all around 5-6 inches in length.

Needed to make a move and find where the better fish were relating, moved into more of the middle of the pond and hit the mother lode. The fish were stacked all around this area, perch, crappie and nice sized bluegill were waiting and ready.

Every hole that I drilled, the jig combination wouldn’t even get close to the bottom and the fish would swarm on it. If you had marks at three different levels, you wanted to get to the bottom marks as the better sized fish were hanging below the smaller ones.

Staying mobile and keeping an open mind as to figuring out how the fish are reacting and what they are looking for to getting them to bite, this is when you hit these areas with numbers of fish, it really becomes a lot of fun and makes you want to return very soon.