I was pulling a crappie from the murky water surrounding a Cypress knee, when the weeds and lily pads 35 feet behind me exploded in a shower of water and mud. The coot I had seen naively swimming among the water grasses appeared to have been breakfast for a large alligator.
Lake Jessup in central Florida is home to approximately 10,000 alligators and one of them had just torn up the water, grass and a small black duck. It is a little unnerving to know that those little round balls that are floating in the water are the eyes of a six foot alligator. On this lake, six feet is small.
The water under us was five to six feet in depth and according to the fish finder, there were plenty of them under the boat. Using minnows on 12 foot fiberglass poles, we had been drifting along the edge of weed beds and lily pads until we caught one and then we would anchor for a while.
In the early months of spring with new growth popping up on grass beds, lily pads and trees along the banks, Lake Jessup at Winter Springs, Florida is a crappie fisherman's paradise. You may have to work for them, because weather conditions in this shallow lake mightily affect the propensity of the crappie to bite.
The town and the lake was in the national news while I was there. Just a couple of blocks from my friend's house on the lake, an eleven year girl wandered off into the marsh. The locals call it a marsh; it looked like a swamp to me. Some said it was alligator infested and that is absolutely correct; most of the time they are hungry.
Fishing for crappie the first week of my stay, we caught mostly females that were about to spawn. Occasionally we would catch a large stray male. Most of the male crappies I have caught were small compared to the female, but these were huge.
With the poles hanging over the side of the boat, we were quite busy baiting hooks and catching the occasional fish. We never got into a bed of fish, though we knew they were there somewhere, but we had to settle for one every five or six minutes.
We probably wouldn't have fished over the beds anyway, preferring to leave the females to lay the eggs and the males to fertilize them. That way we'll have crappie for a long time.
According to conventional wisdom, crappies prefer clear lakes and gently moving rivers. Lake Jessup has neither of these. Its waters have a rusty brown pigmentation that makes it easy to believe there might be monsters beneath the surface. Actually that's not too farfetched a vision. Lake Jessup has more gators within its banks than any other lake in Florida, if not the world.
Alligators or not, it was easy to catch our limits of crappie each day I was there. Besides catching fish, I threw up a few prayers that the boat wouldn't capsize and toss me into the lake with whatever might be lurking down there.
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crappie
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Lake Jessup
central Florida
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Published 21-05-2010
