Crappie! Crappie! Crappie! On Saturday, September 30, Tracy Hayward, Mike Woods and I left Cedar Rapids with the Ranger 620 behind the red Suburban for a week of fishing in the state of Mississippi. We spent our first night at Mike’s cabin on their acreage just past the Iowa-Missouri border. We were up early and reached Lake Enid, MS, late afternoon. We settled in to our cabin at the George Payne Cosar State Park on the south side of the lake near the earthen dam. Lake Sardis, Lake Enid, and Lake Grenada were all built in the 1930’s to provide flood protection for the towns downstream. The US Army Corps of Engineers controls the flow of water out of the lakes with the fall being a time the lakes are typically “drawn down”. Tracy and Mike had fished Lake Enid last year about the same time and the water was much lower. “We had to fish the deeper water closer to the dam using spider rigs to catch our fish last year,” Tracy commented. But 2017 would be different. Our first four days on the water kept most of the locals off the lake because of the strong winds from the southeast. We started catching our crappie on crankbaits and never changed presentations. Our best baits were Number 7 Flicker Shads and the Number 5 Jointed Shad Raps in firetiger, racy shad, pro purple, pro gold and pink, plus a few other bright colors which they seemed to like. We pulled four baits behind Offshore Planer Boards up from the bow of the Ranger while we long lined two 12 foot rods and two “shorties” off the back. We varied the depth of the baits from 3-8 feet and fished mostly 8-14 foot of water along both the north and south shores. Tracy and I took turns running the 15hp Etec kicker with the Minn Kota Ulterra up front steering our way. Mike was our “utility” guy running the planer boards and helping clear lines when the fish hit. We would have made a good video for Utube of our antics in the boat!! So, when the wind died down, we left the spider rigs in the cabin and kept pulling cranks. The weather was warm then warmer at week’s end requiring good face and body protection from the sun and glare off the water. Our very first fish Mike reeled in was a 16 incher! We never caught another one that big but plenty of 13 and 14 inchers (the minimum size is 12 inches) to keep us busy each day at the park fish cleaning station! We ended up with 103 fish for our efforts and caught at least double that number of smaller fish. By the way, we did catch and release some eating size catfish, a few stripers, and a couple rough fish. We left early Saturday morning on October 7 and arrived in Cedar Rapids late afternoon. We listened to another adventure “book on tape” plus checked the football scores of our favorite teams: Iowa for Tracy and Mike and Iowa State for me! Both teams had WINS which made us feel satisfied, just lake our days on the water of Lake Enid! I did file short daily reports you can find on my Gary Speicher Facebook page if you want to check them out. Hope you enjoy the pictures Mike G. has posted with this posting on walleyewisdom.com! Thank you for reading my report and plan a trip through Memphis to fish on some of the best crappie lakes in North America! Spike