For anglers who aren’t equipped or don’t want to fish multiple 12- to 14-foot rods with live bait to catch crappie, Tom Mundy of Fish Stalker Lures in Laurens has an alternative to winter trolling. Mundy’s system involves bridges, deep brush piles, tiny artificial baits and a buggy whip rod. He relates it to “Southern Ice Fishing.”
“We call it ‘Fishing in a 5-gallon bucket,” said Mundy. “Granted, it’s not easy to do, with this little tiny jig and 4-pound test line and 25 feet of water between you and the bucket, but you get it in there and it’ll be worth the effort.”
Mundy said a tiny bait with lot of action will work best, especially if it mimicked a naturally occurring bait.
“Years ago, I was fishing on Lake Greenwood, watching this guy catch fish after fish,” Mundy said. “The guy asked me if I had ever seen a freshwater shrimp. I said no, and he scooped up this tiny sea monkey-looking creature from the water. My first thought was that it would make a great looking crappie bait.”
Mundy described the creature to his soft-plastic mold builder: a small, solid, tube-shaped body with a thin, flat tail. After a few weeks of field testing, he had a simple and effective crappie bait to complement the Fish Stalker roster.
To present the bait, he also designed a 5-foot rod constructed from an ice-fishing blank and paired the rod with whisper thin 4-pound test monofilament.
“I wanted to build a super ultralight rod, similar to a fly rod, but I wanted it in a 5- to 6-foot pole, nothing longer,” he said. “One of the best places to finesse fish is under bridges; a 10-foot rod is hard to manage under a bridge.”
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