Find thermocline to improve warm weather fishing 

By: Glynn Harris

One of my regular contacts I use to get current fishing reports is crappie guide, Wesley Miller. On my visit with him last week, he mentioned something that whetted my interest. He told me that this time of year, he keeps his eye on his electronics to locate a thin line that shows up and he fishes along this line or just above it to locate crappie. 

Kade Hillestad is a young and very successful bass angler who told me basically the same thing when locating bass when the weather is warm to hot. 

Both Miller and Hillestad mentioned the word “thermocline”, which created enough curiosity for me to learn more about what why this magic line is so important to catch fish in summer in reservoirs with sufficient depth to make the thermocline an important issue. 

Exactly, what is the thermocline? I looked it up on-line. The definition is “a middle transition layer in a large body of water where water temperatures change rapidly in depth, separating warm oxygen-rich surface water with water where temperatures fall and oxygen is greatly reduced.”