SHORELINES

6 a p c s hor e l i n e s.c om | 2016 Vol :4 Mark Collins squints his eyes and looks at the boat a short distance away drifting atop Weiss Lake's placid waters. "What's wrong with them this morning, Jim?" he shouts at the other angler fishing nearby. "I don't know," the answer drifts across quietly but distinctly. "They're not biting like they were yesterday," Collins replies. After putting more than 60 of the silvery panfish in his live well the day before, the bite is slow in the early going. But that's crappie fishing even on the lake known as the "Crappie Capital of the World." "Yesterday, every time you turned around, your rod tip was touching the water," Collins says. "Today, it's a very light bite." Not only are the fish hitting less frequently, when they do hit, they nibble tentatively. But a man who spends 250 days a year on the water working as a professional guide knows what to do. "I started out the depth I caught them yesterday," he says. "If that doesn't work, I'll vary my depth until I find out what works." Collins watches as the rod twitches ever so slightly. When it twitches again, he grabs it and pops the tip upward with a rapid snap of his wrist. The whippy 10-foot rod bows and Collins carefully brings the crappie to the surface, then swings it into the boat. After dropping it into a nifty measuring device to make sure it passes Weiss Lake's 10-inch length minimum, he tosses it into the live well. Constructed for flood control and power generation, Weiss Lake entered service in 1961. At 52 miles from end to end, it covers more than 30,000 acres with 15,000 acres of flood easement and 447 miles of shoreline. "It's the first lake (in Alabama) on the Coosa system," says Dennis Trammell, team leader of Weiss Lake Shoreline Management for Alabama Power. Abundant baitfish and deep-water cover create excellent crappie fishing in the lake. "Before they built this lake, most of this was farmland," Collins says. "The farmers left that buffer of trees along the river. When Alabama Power built this lake, they cut those trees down so you've got this line of stumps along the channel." The stumps were cut off about 2 feet from the bottom. "We're fishing live bait 2 to 3 feet from the bottom," Collins says. "We're targeting structure on the edge of the old Coosa River channel." Collins has spent hundreds of hours charting the cover on the bottom of Weiss Lake using a combination of a GPS system and a depth finder. When he finds new cover, he marks it with GPS waypoints. On this day, he is fishing with a spider rig. He uses light, open-faced spinning reels spooled with 20-pound test Epoch braid along with limber 10-foot B'n'M rods. The light action rod is forgiving for clients who set the hook too hard. At the end of the line he ties a ¾-ounce bank sinker. Collins takes No. 1 or No. 2 Eagle Claw Aberdeen snell hooks pre-rigged with 12-pound test leader and attaches them to the bank sinker by passing the loop end of the leader through the hole in "IF YOU HAVEN'T BOOKED A ROOM FOR M ARCH BY JANUARY, YOU WON'T GET ONE. EVERY BIT OF LODGING AROUND HERE IS FULL." – W EISS L A K E FISHIN G GUID E M A R K CO L L INS, O N T HE SP R IN G CR A P P IE SE A S O N T H AT D R AW S P E O P L E FR OM A L L OV ER T HE CO UN T RY. Left: Photo by Billy Brown – Mark Collins with lines in the water of Weiss Lake.

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