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Even though I was fishing one of the private clubs in Will County, I'm sure this would apply to most of the strip mine pits. Went out yesterday afternoon for a few hours. I tried a few pits with the crystal clear water. There were a lot of fish swimming by but no takers. So I moved around and found one that had the silt churned up from the wind. Fishing the lee side I started catching LM bass right away. They were in the 12" to 14" fun sized range. Moved around the same pit to the windward side where the fresh fallen leaves were blowing in and stacking up. Right away I started getting black crappies and rock bass. The crappies were all cookie cutter sized 10.5". The rock bass were the same, which are nice sized but there was one 12", a real surprise. I went through 2 and a half dozen minnows in an hour and a half. All fish are swimming; I'd rather get them through the ice.
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Both ways, open fishes mouth insert hook into mouth and make sure hook point comes thru the fishes eye this makes it harder for the hook to skip back out since eye tissue gets caught on the barb. The next way is to hook them just down from their top fin above the lateral line and just under the spine area ( because you don't want to paralyze them ) so their able to swim freely with a small to med small circle hook, and you don't want to put the hook too far by or into the lateral line because there's a Vien that runs thru that area and if you put your hook into it the minnows won't last as long because they will bleed out and die.
You can do this on all types of bait minnows from the crappie to the medium golden roach minnows and anything bigger bait wise as well, with the small crappie minnows you have to be very careful if you're going to hook them thru the back, Lol not a lot of room there.
Edit: if I remember, the next time I go out I'll try to take some pictures of where I run the hook thru on the minnows.
Got out this afternoon around 2pm and fished until 10pm when it started raining harder, the drizzle started around 9pm which wasn't bad to sit in, but for some reason as soon as it started raining harder the bites just completely stopped which was a little weird because I've caught some really nice fish in pouring rain.
Started the day with buying 2dz med roaches, 2dz med bass, and 2dz crappie minnows and in those few hours I used just about every minnow in the bucket. Great day of fishing! Sorry no pictures today was too busy.
I kept catching 11 to 15 inch crappie's so I turned every one of those back because their the breeder's of our family pit, I was bummed out because I couldn't catch any in the 7 to 9 inch range for dinner. So I kept 6 bass all under 12 inches for eating the bigger one's I threw back as well, all the bluegill caught was also to big to keep not one of them under 10 inches.
In the next few weeks going to have to do a cull on the bass from our family pit, need to take out at least 100 to 200 of the small ones under 12 inches, hasn't been done in over 4 years so it has to be done going to try and get some friends over to help out then we can have a big fish fry.
Was out to shadow lakes this afternoon 2 to 5:30pm and we didn't get anything.
Left there and went to family pit and was there 6 to 11:30 pm till the coyotes ran us off, the only thing crappies would hit on was med roaches, wouldn't even touch med bass and crappie minnows.
Turned them all lose because they were 11 to 12 inches and those are the breeder stock, never caught one that was under 11 inches out of the 30 or more crappie we caught.
Pictures aren't that good because it was dark with the new moon phase.
