There's fishing and there's catching. No one knows that better than fishing guides.
Joe Dennis of Captain J Hook Charters guides anglers for catfish, stripers and crappie on the Santee Cooper lakes and takes clients in search of redfish and trout along the coast. He also co-hosts Father and Son Outdoors TV with Whitey Outlaw (Sundays at 11:30 a.m. on WCBD and Wednesdays at 6:30 p.m. on streaming Pursuit Channel).
Joe invited me to join in earlier this week as he and Whitey, one of the country's top crappie fishermen, entertained some of their sponsors. So I found myself climbing aboard his guide boat on an icy, bluebird morning at Bell's Marina in Eutaw Springs. Also on board were Kaleb Page and Ashleigh Jordan of Catch The Fever rods and Slime Line fishing line. Whitey and his son Matt had others, including Charles and Vicky Sablatura of Rockport Rattlers, aboard their bass boats.
A cooler of crappie caught by clients of Whitey and Matt Outlaw on Nov. 29. Tommy Braswell/Special to The Post and Courier
As we motored away from Bell's to the open water of Lake Marion, Joe began spying striped bass along with lots of bait near the bottom on his fish finder. He stopped the boat and eased the trolling motor down and then flipped a switch in his boat that set off a heavy drumming sound.
It was his Thumper, a device designed to attract stripers. He baited up two rods with shiners and dropped them down and we began to wait. And wait. And wait. These stripers weren't hungry, so we moved to several other spots and repeated the process before moving on to try and catch crappie.
Joe's phone rang several times as he and Whitey communicated about what they were finding. Whitey and his anglers as well as Matt's fishermen were catching crappie well up the lake.
We moved on to brush piles in search of crappie and Joe deployed another device, his Garmin LiveScope, an underwater camera mounted on a short pole that painted a realistic view of what was in front of the boat – a brush pile, stumps and, if they were present, crappie.
"Nobody home," Joe said at the first brush pile, so we motored over to another. This time there were fish hanging near the bottom, so Joe set up two long crappie rods with jigs tipped with shiners. Kaleb and Ashleigh dropped their shiners just above the fish. It was easy to spot their jigs on the LiveScope and Joe instructed them on where and how to move their baits.
Several times, you could see crappie move up from the bottom and make a beeline to the bait. But they wouldn't take it. Kaleb lost a couple of shiners as we tried different brush piles, but the crappie we were finding weren't hungry.
That wasn't the case for Whitey and Matt and their anglers. Lake Marion was their home water and they fished further up the lake.
When we gathered for lunch back at Bell's Marina, they began unloading crappie from their livewells and soon filled a cooler. The largest was a 2¼-pound catch by Vicky Sablatura, her personal best, on a 1/16-ounce orange SlabMax jig head. There also were several more large crappie in the cooler.
I didn't get to fish the afternoon trip but things improved for Joe and his anglers after I left. Even though I didn't reel in a fish, I certainly learned a lot about how rods, fishing line and fishing lures are manufactured and marketed, not to mention electronic devices designed to improve fishing success. But mostly I learned that even though you know the fish are there, and that you can see them, you can't always make them bite. That's why it's called fishing.
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December 05, 2021 at 11:00PM
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Finding fish on Santee Cooper lakes is one thing, making them bite is another - Charleston Post Courier
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