Searching For Crappie At Binbrook
One of the great things about Twitter is that it can help you find new areas to fish and new fishing events to attend. When I saw a tweet from Tony at ifish365.com about the Binbrook Crappie Derby, I decided to look into it further.
Binbrook Conservation Area is in the Niagara Peninsula and home to Lake Niapenco. A quick Google search revealed some good threads about fishing at Binbrook, and I was pleased to read that it has a decent crappie population. I’m a sucker for crappie fishing and thought it would be great to enter my first crappie derby. Before I committed to the derby though, I wanted to check out the lake and see if we could find some fish.
On Sunday Darrell and I loaded up the boat and made the drive to Binbrook for an afternoon of fishing.
There are no gas motors allowed at Binbrook, which is fine by me as our little boat does quite well with just the electric motor. Leaving the gas motor behind also means we can just tip up the wheels on the boat and leave them on while we fish.
I had been forewarned about the murkiness of the water, but I really was surprised by how little visibility there was. It was not easy to find some good structure for a starting point. In fact, the first hour on the lake was a futile search for fish and structure. We marked some larger fish (not crappie) and found a few underwater stumps, but a variety of lure changes and different presentations yielded no fish.
There’s lots of beautiful shoreline to look at in Binbrook Conservation Area.
I’ll admit I started telling Darrell that if there were no fish in this lake we sure as heck were not forking out money to enter the derby. Fortunately, our luck soon changed.
As we moved into one promising area I started casting one of my go-to crappie lures. A couple of casts in I landed a small largemouth bass. Not the right species, and out of season, but at least it got the skunk out of the boat. I got snagged on my next cast, but the one after that finally landed me a crappie.
Alright, so maybe there were fish in the lake after all. Catching one lone crappie did not convince me to buy tickets for the derby, but it gave me hope that we could establish a pattern and land more fish.
We passed several boats that were anchored in promising spots, and moved on to find an area of our own, where we eventually came across the exact type of structure we were looking for. Using our always trustworthy jigs, it didn’t take long to realize we had found crappie. Cast after cast yielded fish after fish. It was awesome. They weren’t giant crappie length-wise, but they sure were chunks. They were some of the heaviest crappie I had held, considering their size.
We had finally established our pattern – we knew what structure we were looking for and what presentation was needed. We moved on and caught more crappie at each location we stopped at. I was sold. Things can change quite quickly, but after catching as many crappie as we did, I happily handed over $20 for my derby ticket. I don’t anticipate catching the heaviest crappie, or one of the tagged ones, but I at least want to be able to catch one crappie, and I feel pretty confident I can do that now.
Besides going back to fish the crappie derby, I’ll being heading back to Binbrook once bass open. After Darrell inadvertently hooked into a big bass, I see good possibilities for a great day of bass fishing this summer.
The conservation area has great facilities, with multiple areas to launch a boat, and several shore fishing locations. Many people were out enjoying the beautiful day, whether on the water, the shore, or the fields. Whether you are going there to fish, or to have a great day outdoors, Binbrook is a great destination. I’ll definitely be heading back for the fishing.
The Binbrook Crappie Derby is scheduled for March 12, 2012 – 6am-1pm. It’s a live release derby with prizes being awarded to the heaviest fish and there are 150 tagged fish. Tickets are available at the park office or at Fishing World. You can buy your tickets ahead of time and use the express lane, or you can purchase tickets the morning of the event.
argosgirl
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