On a hunch, I invited my good friend Dan Hiatt to take along to go do some early summer crappie fishing on the I-82 ponds south of Yakima. We hit pond # 5 after portaging my jon boat in pond # 4 and pulling the boat up and over the separation dike between the two ponds. The water in pond 5 was pretty scummy around the north end trees and we had to clean our jigs and line often. I managed to pick up a few decent crappie along the outside weededge as we pitched and casted jigs along the shoreline. I was using a Yum Dinger 3" Smoke pearl belly colored senko type bait on a jighead when I kept getting bumped just south of the island. I suspected crappie, but suddenly a fish took it and soon I landed a beautiful 2.5 lb Largemouth. Still, the location was perfect for crappie, so I switched to a 2.5" Berkley Gulp minnow in watermelon pearl on a 1/32 oz jighead. There seemed to be some submerged brush in that spot and soon Dan and I started catching 8" to 9" crappie on almost every cast. We stopped keeping them after we had caught 20 or so. The action lasted for another hour and a half untill the skeeters made fishing unbearable. I stopped counting after 70 or so crappie released. Included in this report is our excursion to pond # 7 on the evening of the 6th, where we dropped off our boat along the highway and I road my bke back to the pond while Dan waited. As with pond 5, the Bass, crappie and channel cats were biting, though not as fast as pond # 5. The crappie in pond 7 were bigger too.(The channels were on the small side.) The nicest part was catching so many crappie so close to home! The Jigmiester

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