A Crappie day of fishing... Fish number 5 Black Crappie (Pomoxis nigromaculatus)

We headed down to the Bellamy Reservoir in Madbury NH to fish for Calico Bass with cousin Ronnie.

The fishing was slow at first but as we got going, and Ron entertained us with a sampling of his Karaoke favorites, his singing soon pulled the fish in.

The Mighty Mighty Ron Groves

We found a spot where we've heard that someone sank a few Christmas trees in the reservoir to create habitat and attract fish. This is illegal in NH and we never actually confirmed the existence of the trees but it never hurts to believe in a good a fish story. Using our high tech fish finder we found a spot where the water was 20 feet deep and the fish were suspended between 18 and 15 feet.

The weather was crappy (sorry), 20 degrees and snowy with a cold wind blowing, but Ron wasn't going to let that keep him down, he was there to be a part of our quest and help us out with a couple of species of fish.

We can't believe this guy is single!

While we were working on cooking a nice breakfast of trout-cream cheese bagels (stay tuned for the recipe) Ron quickly jigged up his first crappie of the day and added this fish to our collection. He was jigging in tune with one of his favorite Karaoke songs "Just a gigalo" and like a moth to light the crappie came to Ron's glow in the dark jig tipped with a waxworm.

One of the fun things about crappie fishing is that it's not at all crappy, it's loads of fun.  These fish school and on a good day you can catch dozens of these pretty fish. Big crappies are called slabs and in some places these are a prized game fish, as evidenced by Wisconsin's Crappie-a-thon. The NH record crappie was caught in the Bellamy 2 lbs. 12.8 oz.

Our fish was no slab, and would be called a dink, but rules are rules and we had to eat this fish! Maybe we'll get the record for eating the smallest fish.