Horseshoe Chain of Lakes

Made plans to head out to the Horseshoe chain with a couple buddies on Saturday morning. Met them at the Casey's in Richmond around 7 and after filling up the auger, we headed out. Started out by drilling out on Kron's bay around the meth hole, fished everywhere from 20 feet to 50 feet, but never marked a school of kitties. We did find crappies in seemingly every hole we drilled, however. A little cold right away in the morning, so cold that when I was unhooking one of the crappies his tail actually froze to the spool of my reel. It was never fast and furious for crappies, but we were able to put together a good mess of 10-12" fish on the ice for a meal. At the last spot we hit on Horseshoe, I had a fish come up off the bottom nice and slow and then absolutely smacked my Rattl'n Flyer. I was sure it was either a good catfish or a walleye, but after getting it topside, I was astonished to see that it was a nice sized sucker (which is currently prepping for the smoker.

After catching some more crappies, we pulled the plug and headed to a different lake on the chain. Headed out to a hole that I knew has held some cats in the past. Started drilling across this basin and started finding crappies almost immediately. Figured if we werent going to catch some cats we might as well get into some gills with these crappies and we started drilling closer to the breakline. Right around 26 feet, we were seeing the crappies come and go. Whenever they would disappear, you would see one or two fish come up slightly off the bottom. I started dropping down to these fish when the panfish disappeared and finally hooked into a good eater-sized cat. After missing several more off the bottom, I had one come up a couple feet and hit my spoon and the fight was on. Had several good runs from the fish and finally got it up to the hole. Looking down, I could see that it was a very nice sized catfish. Before, I could get my hand down to help guide him up the hole, my line snapped. Worst than the one that got away was he took my favorite spoon! I had been using that spoon almost the entire winter, had even started to wear some of the paint off of it. Oh well, it happens, here are some photos from the day: