With a little help from my friends

The neighbor who lives across the street is an avid crappie fisherman.  More than avid--fanatical.  As a matter of fact, he fishes in a lot of crappie tournaments, and this year, he and his partner won the Indiana Slab Masters tourney.  That's Doug on the right.

Neighbor Doug has rekindled my interest in crappie fishing.  For one thing, there are tons of them in the lakes here in Indiana, and again, if you match the tackle to the fish, it can be great fun.  Doug has me using 4 lb line, and ultralight rods and reels.   I do well with white jigs most of the time.  Doug gets new and different colored jigs from his sponsors, and is always swearing by the latest colors.  I thought the "dreamsicle" was a little over the top, but we caught fish with it.

My pal Steve has a farm pond.  I can't really say for sure where it's located, because those of us lucky enough to be invited to fish there are sworn to secrecy.  Here's Steve with one of his bass.

This summer, we were joined on Steve's pond by Jacob Wheeler.  Jacob is a very nice young kid from Indiana who has done rather well as a bass fisherman.  He won the Forrest Wood tourney and a prize of $500,000. Not too bad for a 21 year old kid from Indiana.

So when Jacob joined us on the pond, I was all ears.  I have always been more of a crank bait guy, and never really got into fishing with soft plastics (rubber worms.)  I considered catching 4 or 5 bass  at the pond a good day.  That day, Jacob caught about 25.   Soon, I pulled out some plastic lizard thing that had been hiding for years in the corner in the corner of my tackle box.  Jacob says do this and that.............. and it worked.  I started catching bass.

Later, I switched over to my crappie pole, and so did he. We doubled up.

My pal Dawg loves to fish for catfish.  And he's pretty good at it.  Here's Dawg and Richman with a catfish that we've named Walter.  (The big one that day got away.)