Air Cooling Down, Fishing Heating Up

Good fall fishing all around the state

From the Arkansas Game & Fish Commission

www.agfc.com October has always been one of our personal favorite months for just about everything — sports (every major sport is overlapping now), fairs/fests and fishing top the list. Bass and crappie fishing are especially fun for us as the days get shorter and sunset comes so close to dinnertime now.

With those latest fronts that passed through last week, our Fishing Report sources say the fish are responding nicely in many areas around the state now. Even before those fronts, there were signs that fall was approaching, or that the fish were noticing.

• Mike Siefert, who guides at Millwood Lake, forwarded photos (one above right) and information of a fun time: landing two fish at once on more than one occasion. And, he says, a couple of anglers there caught more than 20 surface- breaking bass chasing shad in rapid fire this past week.

• In another corner of the state, the word from Lake Fayetteville is that black bass are excellent on spinnerbaits, plastic worms “and really anything you want to throw,” they say, while crappie and catfish are good.

• In the northeast quadrant, over at Crown Lake the anglers are still fishing for and catching BIG bream, we’re told by the folks at Boxhound Marina. Bass are biting well, but they’re smallish. The catfish, though, are excellent. In east Arkansas at Horseshoe Lake, Ronnie Tice says the crappie have peaked again with excellent results, with big fish and lots of limits caught fast. Don’t worry, though; you can switch over to a good bass bite there when you’ve caught enough crappie, he says.

• In west-central Arkansas, the crappie bite at Lake Nimrod continues to be outstanding, the folks at Andrews Bait Shop & More relate to us.

• A lot of folks have been visiting our AGFC Facebook page of late, asking about the work on Lake Poinsett, which is inside Lake Poinsett State Park on Crowley’s Ridge in Poinsett County south of Jonesboro.

Lake Poinsett has been closed since last year, and the lake was drained for water control structure and erosion repairs as well as work to restore the habitat.

The plans were to have the lake ready to refill next spring.

The latest news at Poinsett is that District 3 biologists in the AGFC Fisheries Division report that 232 spider buckets (photo upper left) have been staged and ready to be deployed in Lake Poinsett. Spider buckets are artificial habitat structures composed of ABS pipe, set in concrete-filled buckets.

These new structures will replace degraded woody habitat as part of the lake renovation. These structures have benefits for all lake species. They can be placed on the ground in shallow, shoreline areas to benefit catfish and largemouth bass or on pallet towers in open waters to give a more treelike appearance for crappie and sunfish species.

• There is plenty more good news the AGFC wants to share with the public. To that end, a public meeting will be held Nov. 14 at the Harrisburg Calvary Church, 503 S. Illinois Ave., in Harrisburg. The meeting starts at 6 p.m., and it will focus on updating the public about the progress of Phase I and what to expect as the project move into Phase II of the total $2.7 million effort to rebuild the fishery. One bit of excellent news: A U.S.

Geological Survey study of the integrity of the sam showed engineers that the dam is functioning as designed and will not require any repair.