East West Crooked Lakes with Derek 5-9-2017

[djkimmel]

Our next weekly trip for Derek and me saw us traveling to an interesting pair of lakes - East and West Crooked Lakes, near Brighton. We're still trying to figure these lakes out.

We decided to start in the shallower West lake thinking more bass would be roaming in warming, shallower water there. At first, we couldn't prove this though we saw a couple bass, and of course, when I casted out over the weeds away from shore, the pike would get me on various lures!! Spinnerbaits, square bills and flukes/stick worms! #$% pike!! There's many little ones in these lakes, but some real stout ones too, so look out!


Derek starting getting a few small to small keeper-sized bass slowly working a fluke over sparse weed flats and near the shallow drops. This was one of the first small keepers.

We did start seeing some more bass but many of them seemed much more interested in roaming verses biting anything. Derek would catch one once in awhile mostly on the fluke. I finally caught a couple small ones on a small jerkbait but the bigger bass we saw (1.5 to 2.5 pounds) were roaming up on a couple shallow flats or new shallow drops inside the inside weedline. These bass generally acted shy to us and our lures though we tried a number of approaches. We didn't see any obvious beds for awhile either.


Finally, on a shallow inside weed edge we don't fish a lot, or generally catch much on I caught a decent keeper and then I popped this solid 3-pounder!!  I was short-snapping a darter on a 1/4 oz jighead again when I got these bass! I caught a dink or two on it also. I actually saw 3 bass on beds and 2 of them were the bass I caught.

We did more of this for awhile but not much happened again. A small bass or two, a small pike or two. Finally, we moved to the East lake and tried more out in the deeper weeds. We would also move in towards the deeper inside weedline off and on. We saw some suspicious spots but no bass on beds for sure. There may have been some shallower?

We caught a few bass out in the deeper cabbage on Texas-rigs (the cabbage was a lot thicker looking than it has appeared to us later in the season). We caught a few bass near the inside weedline. And, of course we caught a few more @#$% pike!! Just can't get away from them... nothing really picture worthy the rest of the hour or so we had available.

And that was about it. We didn't even see maybe as many bass as I expected and caught less than what I expected... but it was a day fishing again, and that's pretty much always good!