Fork Has Some Slabs! - Kevin Rogers

Posted by admin on April 14, 2016

CHARLIE & KEVIN ROGERS

It’s tournament season fishing folks!! My father and I just made our fourth stop on the Bass Pro Shops Crappie Masters Tournament Trail last Saturday at the world famous bass fishing lake (Lake Fork, TX.)!  Lake Fork is well known for its bass fishing.  In fact, the lake caters to bass fishing.  For example there are hundreds of bass fishing guides and lodges all over the lake that are targeting the bass fishing world. And for good reason…..Lake Fork has produced 35 of the top 50 biggest bass ever caught in Texas! Perhaps that’s the reason it’s such an amazing crappie fishery- everyone is busy focusing on bass fishing.  For years our Texas fishing buddies have been telling us what an amazing crappie lake “Fork” was, so no better excuse to go try it out than a Crappie Masters tournament.

With over 27,000 Texas acres to choose from, where does one start? Since we have never been on the lake before, I always start looking on Google earth.  Google earth gives you a real picture of the lake, and I’m looking for one thing- standing timber.  I absolutely always look for stained or dirty water.   I found our spot on the Google earth by locating standing timber…which gives itself away by casting shadows on the water.

Lake Fork was impounded in 1980, so it’s a fairly new lake. And that means the timber is still in good shape. And man was there a lot of it.  In fact, there is more timber on Lake Fork than any lake we’ve ever been on.  Our pre-fishing started on Thursday afternoon and we caught a 2.02lb slab crappie on the very first tree we fished. On the first ten trees we fished we caught seven that were over 1.80lbs. The next 3 ½ days were some of the best one pole crappie fishing we have experienced in our 25 years of fishing crappie tournaments! We caught 62 crappie from 1.80lbs to 2.98lbs.   We came up a little short on tournament day, and finished in 2^nd place with 7 crappie that weighed 14.92lbs. We weighed in the biggest crappie of the tournament at 2.98 pounds!

Our gear and techniques for this trip was our standard set up….go big or go home!  This includes big Bobby Garland Baits (3” Slab Slayers).  We used two main colors- in the low light (early morning) we went with Pennyback, which works great due to its bright tail color.  The second was Double Silver Rainbow; more of a shad imitator. Both were in the larger Slab Slayer.  Our jig heads where 3/16^th pink Mo Glo heads. We always start with larger lures and work our way down in size if needed. One very exciting thing for us last week is that we were able to swing those giant crappie in the boat with our new prototype 10’ signature series Ozark Rod, which will be released to the public this summer.  

I always look for standing timber, especially during a “One Pole” event.  Last week’s event was a One Pole Ultimate challenge….meaning you can only use one pole and artificial baits only.  These type of tournaments happen to be my favorite, as I love standing up on the deck of my boat fishing with one pole and dipping my Bobby Garland Baits around timber.  That, my friends is our passion!

Good fishing -

KEVIN ROGERS

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