Crapacos

I grew up fishing for Crappie along the shores of Brownlee Reservoir, an impoundment of the Snake River along the Idaho/Oregon border.

It’s basically the Crappie Mecca of the Western US. So, in the past few years, I’ve been wanting to get back up that way and go after Crappie on the fly. Given their size and numbers, they’re a perfect match for a light-weight fly rod.

So, we loaded up Brian’s boat and headed up north to give it a whirl. After a nutritious breakfast of Fry Bake Shoppe donuts, we made the drive to Huntington, launched the boat and headed downstream to find the Crappie. It didn’t take long to find the first fish. And the second. And the third….then we lost count. They’d take most any fly I guess, but I liked the “Mata Crappie” fly the best, cuz it got down fast, was good stripped or just hanging and was real buggy.

At one point, I had set one rod down (line in the water) to string up another rod. Then, as I was testing out the new setup, I realized my first rod had a fish on. Before I could put the 2^nd rod down, it too had a fish tugging away. It was tricky stripping in the line…

The rest of the day, we jumped around from spot to spot. Some were good, some were ok.

Cheech and Brian both ended up with a few decent Smallies.

We even fired up the live well and tossed in a few keepers as we went. The last spot we hit was a little inlet tucked away, inaccessible by anything but a boat. It was Crappie-land. You could seriously count on getting a fish or at least a hit on every cast. Sometimes, you’d have two fish at a time. It was fun times for feisty fish on a 4 wt rod.

Heading back to Ontario to the folks’ house, we decided the live-well dwellers would make good tacos. Or “Crapacos” as they’re now known. Lots of work to fillet that many fish, but tasty vittles they were, no doubt.