By fishing nothing but shiners all year long, J.T. Thompson with Living The Dream Guide Service at Toledo Bend has learned what to do and what not to do with them to keep them alive and make them more attractive to crappie.
First off, he likes little bitty shiners because he believes big shiners eliminate some bites from smaller fish.
“Big fish will eat small shiners, but small fish don’t really eat big shiners that much,” he said. “So I’m not eliminating any bites that I might if I used nothing but big shiners.”
Thompson also likes to fish small shiners because they may attract some fish that might already be full from gorging on shad all morning long. His reasoning is that something small and bite-sized is a lot harder to pass up than a bigger meal when they are full.
“Say your wife comes in and tosses you some peanuts after you’ve already eaten supper,” he said. “You’re a lot more likely to grab a couple of them as opposed to if she had set another steak down in front of you.”
Keeping shiners alive during the summer is a challenge that Thompson meets by filling his bait bucket with the water that comes in his bags of shiners and adding some ice to the bucket to keep them cool.
“I just use the ice out of the machine down at Toledo Town,” he said. “There is a chemical in the water that comes with the shiners that breaks up the chlorine that might be in the ice. There’s really not enough chemical in that ice to really hurt them, anyway.”
A third precaution Thompson makes is keeping smaller Frabill minnow buckets on his boats so he can pull some shiners out of his main bucket and put them in easy reach all around his pontoon boat.
“That keeps everybody’s hands out of the main bucket, and that keeps them going a lot longer,” he said. “Those smaller buckets are more convenient because you don’t have to keep going back to the big bucket, but they also keep your big stash of minnows alive a lot longer.”
Editor’s Note: This story appears as part of a feature in Louisiana Sportsman’s August issue now on newsstands. To ensure you don’t miss any information-packed issues of the magazine, click here to have each issue delivered right to your mail box.