11/16 Ceasers Creek Lake

Neil and I went out to Ceasers Creek Lake Saturday in search of musky. Well that was what we had intended on doing anyway. I made sure to bring my crappie and bass rods along too. I got on the water at 9am, an hour earlier than when Neil and I had planned to meet. I started working a large sub surface jointed swim bait  around submerged wood while I waited for Neil to show up. I took notice of two things rather quickly. The first being that the water temp was 39 degrees Fahrenheit. Russ and I fished Rocky Fork Lake the previous weekend and the water temperature was 54 degrees. (For reference Rocky Fork lake is probably only 50 miles south of Ceasers Creek Lake.) I was really surprised to see such a difference in temperatures locally. The second thing that I noticed was that the weatherman was off his game a little, the prediction for winds were 9 to 10 miles per hour. Wright Paterson Air-force base recorded well over 20mph wind speed with gusts over 25mph. The constant 14 plus mile per hour winds had created a few white caps and rolling waves of approximately 2 feet. My initial thoughts were that Neil would show up, see the conditions and decide to hit a nearby river instead. I took a few casts near the boat ramp and then paddled around to get an idea of the layout of the lake.

At 9:40am Neil showed up and started unloading his kayak. I told him that the wind was pretty bad and that the water was 39 degrees. He then pointed out that the lake had been drawn down 4 feet too. It was my first time on Ceasers Creek Lake so I hadn't noticed until I started to look at the  empty banks.  I took a picture of my kayak at the boat ramp, you can see the old water line on the wall behind the kayak and the bare bank on the other side of the boat ramp. He continued to unload his kayak, to my surprise he still wanted to hit the lake. We then started paddling out toward the main lake. As we paddled Neil kept saying how shocked he was to see the lake drawn down so much, and that he had never seen the water so clear. We paddled half a mile in water less than 2 foot before the lake started to open up. Once we got into 5 feet of water we were met by a giant flock of seagulls. We took that as a sign that we were pretty close to bait fish. We started tossing our musky baits around while trying not to snag a seagull in the process.

  We worked our way out into the main lake and started to get blown around by wind and waves. We worked to stay in position and make casts toward the bank, but after an hour of getting beat around we decided to head up the lake and  find sheltered water. We paddled a half a mile up to a small island. On our paddle we started marking fish in 18 to 20 feet of water. We tucked in behind the island and abandoned the musky lures for small 2" blade baits.  We starting bouncing blade baits off of bottom in hopes that the fish that we had marked were saugeye. After 45 minutes we had worked most of the area behind the island without a bite to show for it. We then decided to find a different spot to fish. Neil told me that there was another island a half mile up the lake, and with no better options we started our way around the island. As soon as we left the back side of the island we were met with a half mile of white caps. I stayed dry for about 3 minutes until I took a wave over the side of my kayak. Neil had the Wilderness System Ride 115  which has an elevated seat and higher sides than my current kayak, so he was more prepared to take on water than I was. We finally made it over to the next island and started looking for deep water. Most of the calm water behind the island was 5 to 6 feet deep. On one corner of the island we found a fairly steep ledge which dropped from 9 to 30 feet and was loaded with fallen trees. I told Neil that I was going to try and catch a crappie in order to get my first fish of the day. I grabbed one of my ultra light spinning combos and stared working the base of the tree with a bobby garland baby shad. Neil was stubborn and stuck with his blade bait. He worked the blade bait near the tree tops in 28 feet of water. Twenty minutes passed without a fish, and I started to get discouraged......I don't know much about musky, but crappie on the other hand rank in my top five most targeted fish.




Neil was the first one to get on the board with his blade bait in 28 feet of water. I thought for sure that he had hooked a saugeye, but to our surprise he brought up a very fat 10" crappie. Since he caught a crappie in 28 feet of water I decided to move out and see if the crappie were just holding in deeper water. I positioned my kayak in 15 feet of water right over the fallen trees and started dropping my jig down to the bottom. Once it hit bottom I started to lift the jig off of bottom when I felt the typical crappie "thump". I set the hook and pulled the crappie to the surface. The crappie went 10" and was super fat once again. Neil then caught another crappie in the 11" range. We continued to catch a crappie every ten minutes or so for the next couple of hours. We went on to catch 30 crappie combined before we decided to move to another spot. The average size crappie was about 10.5", much larger than most big lakes I fish. Each fish was super healthy too, most of them looked like they had swallowed a golf ball. Below is a picture of the largest crappie I caught on the day, an 11.5"er.



They weren't the musky we were looking for, but at least we caught fish. At 4pm we decided to start heading back toward the boat ramp. Along the way we stopped to hit the back side of the island and a few shad schools. We absolutely wore the shad out, at one point I snagged 3 shad on three back to back casts. I told Neil that if this kept up I could have a 100 fish day. After snagging a dozen shad we decided to call it a day. All in all it wasn't a bad trip. Air temps were in the mid 50's in mid November so I cant complain.