Man I hate gloomy days. Days that seem to never get warm. Days the weatherman significantly missed the projected hi temp forecast. I just don’t like that type of weather and usually don’t go fishing under those crummy conditions. Yesterday was an exception though. After 5 inches of snow the previous week, I was ready to get the Charger VMAG out and go fishing! I called my buddy Matt Watson from SW Missouri and we decided to try our luck on some new lakes in NW Arkansas.
We started mid morning at Lake Elmdale near Springdale. Not much luck there. We didn’t find any patterns that were easy pickins, so we hopped in the WARM truck and left! Elmdale is probably a very good little lake. We didn’t give it much time. I was itching to try SPWPCO Lake yesterday too, so we didn’t spend much time looking around.
Arrived at SWEPCO boat ramp and the water was steaming! SWEPCO is a power plant Lake so the water is toasty warm year around. (57 degrees yesterday) The rest of the Lakes in our area around NE Oklahoma are cold. Just 41 degrees right now. Luckily, our move paid off. We immediately found some great looking brushpiles. Fortunately for us, they were loaded with young Black Crappie. The Lake has only been recently stocked with Crappie so the average size isn’t very big. Give the fish in there a year or two and SWEPCO is going to be a great Crappie destination with some large Black Crappie. Typically, power plant lakes have above normal growth rates!
Here is our Crappie fishing video from SWEPCO. We show you how we set up and caught our hot water, power plant Crappie using Garmin Livescope, Big Eye jigs, Smelly SMAX and Crappie Kickers.
