 Nice, hybrid crappie right here, first year at F-14. Nailed it, fishing shallow backwaters is what we're doing. What is up guys, Johan here. It is pretty early, sun is just popping up. I am here in south central Minnesota, I think. The metro area, as you can hear by all these cars going by, trucks going by, train going by. I drove about three and a half hours last night. I was in northwest Minnesota yesterday doing some pan fishing and I'm gonna meet up with some guys today to do a little bit of crappie fishing down here in the metro area, which sounds pretty fun. Been doing some truck camping, it just is way easier than checking in the hotels and staying in hotels for me. So I'll show you the outfit right here. It's like a disaster in here right now, but there's a bed right here that is memory foam mattress, got my pillow, a sleeping bag and just a bunch of ice fishing gear scattered in there. Coldest night so far has been four degrees. Last night was pretty warm, it was like probably 22 degrees as a low, yeah, 22 exactly. Wasn't too bad at all. The reason I'm filming in this little parking ride area, there's two giant trees here that I'm not sure what they are. We don't have trees quite like this in Maine even though we're at the same parallel north-wise. But there's one right here, take a look at that beauty. That's a big tree, it's got a great big bark on it. I'm not sure what it is. It reminds me of some, like we have weeping willows, but it's not a weeping willow, I don't think. But that's kind of what it reminds me of because the branches all pointing down like that. But the bark is like crazy thick and then this one's way bigger. This one's huge. This is a ginormous tree. Look at the size of this tree. I don't know if you could see like, it's way bigger than me. And like, it would probably take, it would probably take at least three of me to reach around and hug this thing, maybe four. So I don't know what it is. If you guys know what it is, let me know in the comments. Some kind of larch or willow or something, but it is ginormous. Pretty cool. Stay tuned for this episode. I'm fishing in the metro somewhere for crappy. Maybe some big bluegill too, we'll see. I am inside the metro area. We're fishing backwater flooded slews. We're looking at a maximum depth of four foot fish that come in when it's flooded, get trapped in here and then just dominate the water column and eat everything they can and grow. But they are highly pressured. As you can see, there's a handful of guys out here already and full of guys over here. And these fish get beat on all the time. So they're pretty smart. So I'm gonna learn some really cool tactics today to catching these pressured crappy. I think this is gonna be a fun episode. That one big one that came in had to have been a crappy, shape-wise. But the other two that just looked at me, I think might have been bluegill. It's gingy though, dirty, dirty water over here. Not much for visibility. It's actually cleaner than it was last time we were out here. Oh wow. Yeah, I got maybe a foot of visibility. Yeah, we probably had about three inches when we were out here the first time. Dang. Maybe four inches. Wow. Here comes something small. Yeah, there's a lot of bluegills down there. They all usually come from the bottom. Yeah, just probably a gill then. The crappies will just usually just come straight in when they're big. Here's one. That's not a bad gill. Not a bad gill, huh? No, no, no, no. Look at that, baby. I could get back down with a little bit. All right. Your dog's staying right there this far. That's a pointer. I don't even care if there are three inches. I like that fish. All right, first one of the day for me. He was not slow, I'll tell you that. What's that? He wasn't slow. He came in hot. Yeah, they come in, it's pretty. Yeah. Yeah, so we're just fishing a backwater out here. Just, is it 4.4 feet? Catching them just a couple of feet under the ice and they just keep moving around and we keep moving with them. So it's about what we're doing. Wow, look at that one. Wow, nice. So that's half and half? Yep. That's a big neck, huh? Yeah. Pretty big mouth on them. Yeah. And they get that different forehead than the blacks? Yeah. Well, you see how the stripes kind of die out? Mm-hmm. Like stripe, stripe, and then it goes to the black. He just had a monster. We all know that feeling. This is basically just a backwater river lake that kind of refills actually every year, at least when the river floods. So, yeah. Get some new blood. Exactly, it's a very fertile, a lot of bait in here all the time, so. Media's all that white, they're thick. Sometimes there's no talent. No, that might be a hybrid. He's got a lot of broken lines. Hybrid? Yeah. They have a thick this one. Yeah, so you see how his lines aren't like straight? Yeah. They kind of go and break the heart. The whites will be like... Oh, okay, cool. Yeah, it'll be like defined. They won't be all broken out like that. Are you eating these or not? No. All right, there's my first hybrid, guys. It's just thick through. Kind of meaty. We're gonna get him back. Let him grow. Let him go. That's what we say, and then this lake just freezes solid and this kills everything in here. Oh, no, really? Yeah, you can really catch anything back here. We've caught walleyes through the ice, bullheads, griff you've been catching, carp through the ice back here, white, black, crappies, sunfish. Really, everything lives back here. Anything that's in the river, you could pull out the catfish the next thing you know. Really stressing the shallow water again. I mean, we've got to really be quiet out there. I think you've noticed that we're tiptoeing to holes, try not to make a lot of noise. Any noise will move the whole school and we've drilled probably 75, 80 holes today, trying to stay on top of them. Now it's a little snow falling. I think the big ones are starting to bite and I think we can get another one before the night's over. A hybrid crappie right there. White, black mix. Got it on the tip up with a salted fathead. Homemade. And remember when you're measuring crappies, close their mouths. Yeah, that's over two pounds easy. Costs it back, yep. Sean, you're putting a good bag together. I told Joe we'd get a 15, we're still trying with that too. We're getting closer. Not a bad one there. A little black. What do you got there, Chris? This is a thick one. So even in the shallow water, one of the tools that we can use is live imaging, whether it's a hummingbird, Garmin. I choose Garmin here, put it in the water. Right now we can see out about 50, 60 feet in this shallow water. If you're in deeper water, you'd be able to see out a little bit further. But I have this handle set up. It's pointed the direction that I'm looking, right? So I'm looking 30, 40, 50, 60 feet out to see if I see any fish. If we're looking at this 25 foot mark right there, we're seeing a pretty nice sized fish right there. Likely a big crappie, which we've been chasing around all day. As I'm painting to the right, Driftan helped himself, he's going after it. Pinned to the right, not too much over there. We're seeing a fish here, fish there. We're really trying to look for a couple fish schooled up. Three fish, four fish is starting to get fishable. Griff is very close to those fish right now. We can actually hone in the distance a little bit here. And we can watch this fish starting to swim towards the camera there, the transducer. Nah, he's coming towards us. That's something a little bit smaller, probably not a giant crappie there, maybe a bluegill. Griff's probably out here at this 22, 24 feet. Can't quite see. You can see his jig right down here at the bottom. Hey, Griff, raise it up about a foot and a half. Yeah, so you can see this fish coming in. We got two foot grid right now. So that's actually a pretty decent sized fish. If we zoom into one foot grid. Yeah, he's over. He's coming to check over, check out the camera. Here, let's train the fish, where is he at? Awesome. Right there, is that him? Yeah, him swimming away a little bit. Yeah, that's a beauty. Nice. Hybrid crappie right here, 13 and a half, 14. Planned blade spoon. Did a griff over on the live scope, walked them right to me. Came up, didn't hesitate, nailed it. Good one. Four feet of water. He's thick. Crossing back. Me, it's gonna be a pound and three quarters coming in two pounds. Sure thing. Good catch. Thanks, man. Let's upgrade that one. All right. We don't have any snowpack on the ice. We're crunching, there's slush over there. We're sloshing around in. In this shallow water, any little noise will spook those fish. It's cool you could see his jig from all the way over here. Just that little tiny bit. Yeah, we've had a few times where we've watched other people yank up fish today, but really using this to find where those fish are setting up areas that they're using and then going over there with our Vexlars, Humminbirds, Flashers and putting jigs in their faces. But using this as our search tool, not necessarily fishing with this in the same hole. In this shallow water, they get to the hole really quick. So if you've got a big transducer like this, you're gonna wrap up in it almost every single time. So using our Flashers, using this to search and finding some nice crappies today. Oh, here we go. Here we go. There we go. Solid crappies. And then working as a team too. You don't see that everywhere. The costumation. Yeah, that is interesting. In this shallow water and in these backwaters we've had times where we have one person on live scope. We have two people with augers drill it and we're actually trying to herd those crappies into holes that we already have drilled being that they're so spooky you can't drill on top of them. So we're drilling holes just to simply move those fish and get them back to where we can get over the top of them on our existing holes. So a lot of teamwork involved. Landing fish, herding fish and hopefully a couple more big ones yet to round out tonight. Yeah, I got a clam bladespoon, rattling bladespoon on there with kind of half a salted fat head on there and this color seems to work really well on a lot of the backwaters. Some of the key forage in here is emerald shiners and this bait really does a good job of mimicking the color of those in the flash of those emerald shiners. So this seems to be a hot color whether you're using it in a pinhead minnow or a rattling bladespoon like I have today and I think Griffin using the tungsten maki maki over there and using some plastic. So a little bit of grab egg of everything but they're definitely liking this today and this color. And guys at home, I think you could tell how hard these guys are working, not just to find the fish but to stay on them by looking at this yard sale we got out here on the ice. If you look around, there's like augers, electronics, rods, reels, shacks, dogs, sleds, chairs. There's everything everywhere and it's just these guys probably each put on two or three miles in like a hundred yard circle just walking, hitting each hole back and forth and then jumping around and following the fish. It's kind of a numbers game where you're putting your bait in front of as many fish as you can, you know, the most possible and trying to pick out some bigger ones out of those schools. Flag, little bit of action. Head shaker, little guy. How we've been using the set lines to cover water, right? So we're chasing around these schools of fish on foot with our jigging rods and our flashers but we're allowed two lines of Minnesota. So everybody always has a jigging rod set up and then we have whether we're using tip ups or eye fish pros, we spread those out away from us, right? So if we have a tip up 30 yards away and that tip up keeps going up, we know the fish are moving over there and it's quiet over there. So those fish are more willing to bite than the fish that we've been walking over top of all day. So sometimes they just want some peace and quiet and they'll eat a minnow that's sitting in front of their faces that's spread out away from kind of all the action. So using that to cover water, target some new fish and diversify our offerings for these fish. Imagine sometimes the biggest fish you catch comes on those, right? Oh, oftentimes. I mean, a 16, 17, 18 inch crappie, they don't get old by being dumb, right? They've seen a lot of things and they've seen a lot of jigs before and sometimes just that natural presentation of a fat head on a plain hook is what gets those big ones to commit and fools them. So some of them are really good, so. So griffs tend to walk and it's in on life scope where these two big fish are moving. Trying to tip toes best I can in this slush, half frozen slush. How are we griff? Yeah, in this shallow water, they just move so fast. Can't keep up with them. Yeah, they're pasting, you know. They're that next set of holes. I'll give them one more go. What do you like for a length on a rod? A whole hoppin', I like to fish a lot of 34, 36, 38s. Anything over 36 doesn't fit in a rod locker real well, so this one's a 36, my buddy built it for me. Built off of a perch plank. Is that the best we got? Look at that one. This one's like 15. Got a glimpse of him for a second. Up or down or everywhere I'm at? He's moving still. Literally came like this a little bit. It doesn't work every time, guys, but it's been working a lot today. These guys work as a really good team. Pick off these fish, coming back to the line. Well, that's gonna do it today. We had some pretty good fish on the ice. You didn't get to see all of them. Gryff, how many think you pulled out today? 25. Yeah, he got a pretty easy 25 with up to 13 and a half, 14 inches. Really thick ones too. I was able to land my first hybrid, which was really cool. I did not get a white, but I got a half white. And Cody caught some good ones and Sean did too. So all in all, great day in Minnesota. Had a lot of fun fishing inside City Limits. I think. Are we inside City Limits? Yeah. All right, we're in the City of Limits. So that was kind of cool for me too.