Took a few days off, and like my normal luck, weather and life gets in the way of fishing... but we will keep up the good fight!

Got up early Wednesday and went to the lake. Weather looked ok for Wednesday and Thursday, and I was ready to try them. Had a couple of things I needed to finish on the new Garmin install, and test the mounts for the Livescope pole, then I was planning to fish for blues. Got there and threw the cast net a few times, got a little bait there at the dock, and a nice 1.5 lb crappie... was a little surprised to find them that shallow, thought maybe a fluke but back to the catfishing and work.

Got everything ready and needed to move trolling motor to check livescope mount beside it... moved motor and no light or beep... odd. Check motor, and batteries are DEAD. All 3 are stone dead. 3 weeks ago, before last big cold front, all was good and full charged with onboard system, and system showed they were good. Plug charger in, and it shows error code, bad battery. These 3 are up under the helm, and not easy to get my old fat tail to... but get them unwired and out. One showed less than a volt, one 3 volts and one 5 volts when unwired... Guessing maybe one went bad and with them wired in series for 36 volts, the bad one pulled other two down??? Anyone with more knowledge have ideas? I am going to get them in the shop today, check fluid levels and put on charger one by one, and see if any are good... battery prices are so attractive! LOL I did check all the wires, made sure nothing was shorted or grounding from my other work. All wires show fine with a meter, no shorts, no real resistance, No grounding of hot wire, etc.

So, back to the fishing. After all this mess, the wind is now blowing about twice what the weather app had said the night before, and with no trolling motor, decided to just go ride around and play with new Garmin. Man, that picture is MUCH nicer than my Lowrance ti2. Side scan especially... looking forward to using this! Had planned to play with the livescope some, but with no trolling motor and 10+ winds, not going to keep the barge still long enough to look at the brush piles I had marked. So decided to go back to the dock, and get some work done around the house that I had been putting off.

Docked boat, and decided to play with livescope a few minutes. Turned it on, and there are some fish swimming around the brush I put around the dock... pick up a crappie rod and jig, and about a minute later, a 1.8 pound crappie. In the fish basket it goes. Proceeded to catch nine between 1.2 and 1.9 pounds over the next couple of hours, all from the dock. Lost a couple more.

So, to the meat of this post... While cleaning the crappie, all I can think about is how much good blue cat bait I am throwing away, with every fish I clean! Those were some big crappie heads... but those rib cages I cut out... man those would be perfect on a lot of lakes if I lived in OK or most other states... LOL

I enjoyed the thump, and they are going to eat good after a hot grease bath... but I keep thinking about the blues, and the great bait I threw to the turtles...

Do I have an addiction? Blues on the brain?

This wind today is terrible, but tomorrow - Saturday, looks to be nice. Think I will go try them!

Good luck all!

Big crappie heads = Big blues, no doubt!

Yep too bad you can’t use them in Texas. We are at the lake house this weekend and this lake doesn’t have many blues. But it has a great population of crappie. They are starting to move shallow. I caught 3 crappie last night in about 3’ of water and missed a couple more. But I did catch about a 6 pound bass on a crappie jig. That was fun.

Crappie are definitely moving up. Caught two last week on the Brazos full of eggs, while trolling with rattletraps for Sandies. I'm headed to Eagle Mountain to try and troll for some big Blues tomorrow myself.

As far as batteries go, I was always told by our racing battery guys that any 12V battery that has less than 10.5-11 volts, is junk. Even a fully discharged battery should still show around 11 volts. Same way with our 16 volt stuff. Less than 14.5 means they're junk. You can charge them up, and they'll read full, but they'll quickly die off with any load at all.

I am always baffled as to why, in Texas, crappie are considered gamefish so verboten for bait, while bluegill are considered panfish and are legal for bait. More puzzling is the fact that largemouth bass are technically panfish (or so I always heard) but they are considered game fish.

There you make the best out of a bad deal with the batteries .