A late night fishing adventure: Plankton, alewives light the way
PORTERSVILLE — Stars appeared and disappeared in the night sky, evidence of unseen scattered rain clouds blowing over Lake Arthur. The impoundment, about 40 miles north of Pittsburgh, was calm and quiet as we put in after dusk from McDanel’s Launch at Moraine State Park in Butler County.
I rode in the front of a 14-foot Vbottom outboard piloted by Joe Fazio of Mount Washington. The retired city cop fishes almost exclusively for crappies at Lake Arthur, hosting two Facebook Group pages, Lake Arthur Crappie Anglers and Crappie Crushin’ TV.
In a recent Fishing Report, Fazio spoke of a “crazy, crazy slab fest” with more than 100 good-sized crappies boated on one night at Lake Arthur. I knew he knows these waters, skeptically applied scientific method to his tactics and caught enough fish to know that he’s not telling fish stories. I happily accepted his invitation to join him on a nighttime Lake Arthur crappie cruise.
On lakes deep enough that layers of warmer and cooler water separate like milk and cream, a thin horizontal thermocline of intermediate water forms between them. Not only do the layers vary in temperature, the thermocline changes position with the weather. In waters with such a barrier, successful fishing is often about finding the thermocline and locations where it intersects with the rising lake bottom.
“In the spring with the unusual weather we had, the thermocline never set up,” said Fazio. “There wasn’t a typical crappie spawn. Now [the thermocline] is set. Surface temperature is 80 degrees. We’re going to follow the thermocline right to where it meets the bottom at a submerged brush pile.”
That was the plan. During his hectic 100-crappie night, Fazio said a boat coasted to within 10 feet of his starboard bow, surprising him in the dark. While he was telling the encroachers to back off, they were taking GPS coordinates of the hotspot, he said.
On this night, chugging toward the juncture of thermocline, bottom and brush, Fazio saw the same boat, the same guys, fishing in the same spot. Acknowledging that no one can own a fishing spot, Fazio said “spot locking” is an occasional consequence of sharing fishing information on his internet sites.
“They follow me, some of them,” he said. “They know I know where the fish are.”
Fazio switched to Plan B, following his electronics to one of the valley’s original creek channels. At night, he said, the crappies and other fish travel the submerged channels like highways to familiar feeding stations.
Quietly, we dropped the anchors directly over the old creekbed and a submerged road. With his running lights attracting gnats, he turned on additional side-mounted LED lights and a submersible light that painted the surrounding water an eerie pale green.
“We’re right over the channel, which is a travel corridor,” said Fazio. “At night, the lights attract the zooplankton to congregate. The alewives will find the plankton and hold here to feed. The crappies will hear the alewives splashing and they’ll stay until the food is gone. Eventually the bigger predators come to eat the crappies. It takes about an hour to set up. It’s just thewhole food chain.”
While the lights did their work, each of us rigged two light-action spinning rods strung with 4-pound line. At the ends we tied ⅛- ounce and 1/16-ounce jig heads. One was baited with a 1½-inch to 2-inch fathead pierced between the lips and nostrils. A 1½-inch soft plastic grub was stretched over the other jig. Fazio likes the Dead River Bait Co.s sperm-shaped Unicorn Minner with a chartreuse tail and purpleblue body.
As predicted, it took about an hour for the food-chain attractant to draw the zooplankton and splashing alewives closer to the boat. On cue, one of Fazio’s lines, visible in the light, began twitching and he pulled the night’s first crappie over the gunwale.
Below the boat, he said, a writhing ball of alewives was rising and falling as they followed the plankton.
“The alewives never go below the thermocline, which is now at 16 feet,” he said. “The crappies’ eyes are on the top of the head, so they’re looking up at the prey. The biggest crappies are directly below the ball. What I do, I keep adjusting my depth so I’m fishing just below the bottom of that ball of alewives. When they...”
He abruptly set the hook on both rods, a two-fer as both tips bowed at the same time.
I struggled a bit with the depth, sometimes making my baits virtually invisible inside the moving mass of alewives, or dropping the jig too deep, below the thermocline and the crappies’ view.
Two brief bursts of rain didn’t impact the fishing. Neither did the dark new moon.
“Tonight, it’s all about the thermocline,” he said.
The bites stopped and no alewives splashed. Fazio turned to his depth finder. The small markers had disappeared and a big cigarshaped line slowly passed 16 feet below the hull.
“Seethat? That’s a Northern pike or a muskie that came in for the crappies,” he said.
Our rod tips remained still until the fat line slowly moved off the screen. Cautiously, perhaps, the alewives returned to the lighted water to feast on plankton, and the crappies skimmed over the thermocline right behind them.
By the time we tied to the dock at about 3:45 a.m., I had boated and returned more than a dozen crappies. Fazio caught and released about 30.
“We’d have done better at the Plan A spot,” he said.