Lake of the Ozarks Winter Fishing

Lake of the Ozarks has been fishing really well this past week! plenty of nice largemouth bass and crappie being pulled out recently. With the water temp around 43 degrees the fish are schooling and roaming in most deeper channel areas. Largemouth bass have been crushing a jerk bait and a rig in anywhere from 12-30 feet of water. Anywhere that there is deeper water in a creek or along a main lake channel graph over it and see if you find bait fish. Locating the bait fish is key to loading the boat with an active school of crappie or bass.  

       I found a large school of shad in a creek all ranging from 2-3inches long. There was a mega school of crappie engulfing the shad chasing them all across the cove. Staying with the bait fish I worked a small swimbait, a 3-inch spark shad through them and also threw a larger style bobby garland crappie swim bait. The bait was suspended in the middle to lower water column in 25-30 feet of water getting pushed all over by an aggressive school. It seemed when I found nicer sized shad the crappie was consistently bigger around 11-13 inches instead of picking through tons of little crappie. Letting my bobby garland sink around 20 feet then slowly let the line pendulum swing back to the boat or ever slowly reeling the bait. To target the more aggressive bigger fish in the school I would use a 15–20-foot diving jerk bait, get it in the water column of where the fish are actively feeding and give it a jerk jerk with a long 8-10-second-long pause in between. doing this I had multiple crappies at 14inches and a few nice keeper bass as well. 

If you are yet to go wintertime fishing at Lake of the Ozarks, you are missing out. Nonstop fish action with both bass and crappie, the serenity of having the whole lake to yourself and lots of wintertime crappie to feed the family.