“Here crappie, crappie, crappie,” I called. “Sounds like you’re changing your fish call from here fishy, fishy, fishy,” exclaimed my friend and fishing partner, Tracy Hayward. And that we did–for four days we pursued the tasty southern crappie on Kentucky Lake out of Buchanan Resort. We cancelled our scheduled trip to the Mississippi lakes of Enid and Grenada when the high water reports caused concern. You may recall our last October trip to Grenada Lake where we made new friends with BJ and Tammy Honeycutt from Kentucky. “Why don’t y’all join us at Kentucky Lake,” BJ suggested. He and Tammy take their truck camper down for the month of April each year and hit the pre-spawn bite by pulling small jigs/plastics about fourty feet behind the boat. So we did. BJ had referred us to the Buchanan Resort, a fixture on the west side of the lake since the late 1940’s after the River was flooded to create Kentucky Lake and Lake Barkley to the east. Please check out the Buchanan Resort website for a history of their resort and amenities. Tracy and I had pulled his new Lund 1875 Impact down to break-in the Mercury 150, learn his Hummingbird electronics, and just get the boat “wet”! The Lake is really a river with uneven shoreline meaning you need to stay between the buoy markers until you get a feel for safe areas to fish. Tuesday was very windy but we were able to pull our Berkley Flicker Shads in a couple spots and catch some nice crappie along with a bonus sauger! Wednesday morning found us dealing with a boat motor issue– we received good help from Brenda and Brian at the Resort’s Mercury Marine dealership. Brian troubleshot the problem and got us back on the water early afternoon. We pulled our cranks on calmer water and found a new area holding fish. It’s hard to hide on the system–anglers pulling jigs or spider rigging tell you where the active fish are holding. We continued our trolling pattern on Thursday with good results. Friday morning we tried pulling jigs with BJ and Tammy in a cove but moved back to trolling on the main lake. A word of caution–there are many poorly marked nets set up to catch Asian Carp. Both Kentucky and Tennessee are concerned about the carp problem and are subsidizing commercial fisherman to net them! Unfortunately, the nets catch cranks, too!! Our best results were pulling Berkley #7 Flicker Shads, Vexan #5’s, along with the new jointed Flicker Shads. Tracy kept us in 15-20 feet of water on flats off the main old river channel. The crappie we marked were from the bottom up to about 15 feet so we ran the baits at about 13 feet. The little boogers would see them and come up to inhale the crank! We caught around 30 fish daily with 18 being over the 10-inch minimum size. We caught a few Lake Grenada size and I lost a really good one Friday morning right at the boat! Fortunately, we were able to catch and clean fish over 11 inches long. Oh, I forgot–we caught a “bonus” fish our first day–a Kentucky Lake sauger!! His appearance was much darker than the saugers we see on the Mississippi River or the Illinois River. The restaurant opened Friday at the resort so we took our Tuesday catch in for their cook to prepare with the sides….we had enough to feed us plus the wait staff!! A special thanks to Tammy, BJ, and their son, Hunter, for showing us around and sharing fellowship over breakfast each day and most evening meals. Also, thanks to Brenda and the Buchanan staff for their support. We made some new angling friends with locals impressed with Tracy’s new Lund–I think he could have sold it a couple times!! We learned the thunderstorms were moving in Saturday so we paid our bill Friday and left early, early Saturday morning for the wet ride home. Would we go back? We talked about this on the way home and agreed Lakes Enid, Sardis, and Grenada would be our preferred crappie fishing lakes. However, if you’d like to experience a friendly southern experience with “good” crappie fishing, you should check out Kentucky Lake! One final thought: if you like pulling cranks off Offshore Planer Boards….you won’t have any competition!! “Here crappie, crappie, crappie!”
