Slab spawning season is in full bloom
The month of April carries a lot of special celebrations with it – April Fools Day, Easter, Passover, even National Grilled Cheese Sandwich Day, but for anglers, the whole month is the pinnacle of crappie season.
One of the reasons that Crappie Season is enjoyed by so many anglers is they can catch crappie with numerous techniques. And this month, almost all of them work great. If you are new to crappie fishing or just looking to try something a little different than normal, give one of these three tried-and-true crappie fishing strategies a shot.
Tight Lining
The name Ed Duke and Southern Crappie Rods are synonymous. Based in Concord, NC, Duke makes crappie fishing rods to fit all occasions. He is a firm believer in tight lining for crappie, especially when they are spawning.
Usually, tight lining is associated with slowly drifting or trolling to locate crappie, but knowing fish are going to be on cover, he cuts out much of the time in between. It’s a well-known fact that black crappie spawn as much as three weeks earlier than white crappie. That means the month comes in with black crappie already orienting to spawning cover.
“Many of our Carolina lakes are loaded with black crappie and the water is going to be pretty clear,” said Duke. “Anytime you have both black crappie and clear water in the same lake, you need to fish tight to the structure.”
Most of that structure will be in the form of brush piles sunk in the lake by anglers, whether that brush is out by itself or adjacent to a boat dock.
“When you get into the backs of feeder creeks, you’ll usually start to mark brush piles,” he said. “That’s where you need to drop a minnow right on top of the brush.”
“I like the minnow for the scent and a hair jig for the action and some added color,” he said. “I use a 1/16-ounce hair jig in either red, pink, or white and I’ll tip that with a medium minnow. Another good choice is the Charlie Brewer Slider. It will give the bait lots of action even when the boat isn’t moving fast.”
Duke will use three or four of his Southern Crappie Rods in 14 foot lengths and place them in rod holders on the front of the boat. Instead of trolling, he is simply going to try to hold the boat steady with the rods dangling over the top of the structure.
“I’m using a No. 6 gold Eagle Claw hook with a minnow and a split shot and I’m just going to sit on top of that brush,” he said. “It’s easy to get a limit of good 11- or 12-inch eating-size fish this way.
“When they stop biting at one spot, go to the next one,” he said.
Single Pole Jigging
Sometimes in crappie fishing, many anglers get caught up with staying abreast of the new trends rather than sticking with what works to catch fish. This is the motto of Taylors, SC veteran crappie angler Bill Brookshire.
Brookshire is a wizard with a single pole, his tried-and-true tactic for catching crappie, and he doesn’t see the need to change. He uses one pole to jig around brush and boat docks and generally comes home with a limit of fish on almost every trip in the spring.
His equipment consists of a 9-foot fly rod outfitted with an ultralight spinning reel and 6-pound monofilament line. Tied to the end of the line is a single 1/16-ounce jighead that 99 times out of 100 will be adorned with a simple pearl umbrella tube jig.
“That’s what looks most like a minnow to me, and I catch about all of my fish with it,” he said. “Sometimes I’ll swing the jig up under a dock. But most of the time, just holding the jig still, right there where the fish are, is all it takes to get a bite.”
For Brookshire, he feels like he can catch crappie on just about any lake he fishes, so long as that lake has boat docks on it.
“Just about everybody who has a boat dock puts brush out around their docks. So finding places to catch crappie in the spring isn’t a problem,” he said. “Another thing you can do is keep notes from year to year. I have log books that go back 30 years. I make a note which docks hold crappie and which don’t.”
Brookshire’s fishing pattern is simplistic. He starts his milk run of boat docks and brush piles, dipping each one with the fly rod before moving on to the next. He rarely has to pull off more line than the length of the rod to reach crappie that are holding in or suspended above the brush.
The presentation is either vertically to the brush or swinging the jig up under likely cover, such as a boat dock, and letting the jig pendulum back to him. Occasionally, he will spy brush out in the middle of a cove that has been freshly placed during the winter and claims these locations will almost always hold crappie.
“Sometimes you have to look real close. All you might see is just a twig sticking up out of the water,” he said. “It may look like a twig but if it’s in 6 or 8 feet of water, you can bet it’s just the tip top of a brush pile.”
Longlining
Jon Cannon, a native of Chapin, SC has been fishing with the South Carolina Crappie Association since its inception 20 years ago. Partnering with his father, Ellis Cannon, the Cannon team are consistent finishers in local tournaments with the majority of their success coming from longlining.
Longlining is a popular, multiple-rod trolling tactic for crappie that can produce numbers of fish during the majority of the year. It’s distinguished from “spider rigging” another popular multi-rod tactic, by the positioning of the rods and the amount of line in the water. In crappie circles, spider rigging or tightlining is often referred to as “pushing,” while long lining is called “pulling.”
“We cast each rod out about 40 feet,” said Cannon. “All of our rods are rigged with single 1/16-ounce jigs. The depth the jig is fished is controlled by the speed of the boat when trolling. We start out trolling up around 1.3 mph if the fish are shallow or suspended in 2 to 3 feet of water and slow down to around .5 mph if the fish are deep, like 15 to 20 feet. If they are that deep, we may add a single split shot to the line about 2 feet above the jig to help get it down.”
Cannon relies heavily on a variable speed trolling motor to do most of the work when it comes to maintaining proper speed and course during a longline trolling run.
“I like the variable speed control on my Minn Kota Power Drive,” said Cannon. “Because we control depth by our speed, I have to be able to make slight adjustments to compensate for any wind, current or waves while we’re fishing.”
Longline trolling is primarily an artificial bait-oriented tactic. The idea is to present some variation of crappie jig to mimic a disoriented baitfish swimming through the water. Although anglers may tip their jigs with live baits when the water temperatures cool later in the year or if fishing gets slow, using straight jigs is usually the norm.
“We use a number of different jigs but we probably like Kalin’s the best,” said Cannon. “The curly tail is real thin and that makes for better action, especially at slower trolling speeds. Anything with orange in it has been a good color for us.”
Dealing with current
Some anglers claim that crappie avoid current like the plague and will only fish in areas where nary a ripple is found on the water. Other anglers swear that crappie don’t mind current and as evidence, recount the times when they caught fish in 30-mph winds or drastically rising or falling water.
In areas of modest or temporary current, crappie will often use available structure to break the flow of the current and provide them with both rest and an ambush point. One noticeable advantage of areas that provide current versus more stagnant areas is the levels of dissolved oxygen. Moving water may tend to fall on the cooler side. And cooler or “fresher” water, as in runoff, may hold more oxygen. Both baitfish and gamefish are drawn to areas holding more dissolved oxygen.
Another debate often ensues over which direction the angler should present his baits when dealing with current. One school of thought indicates that crappie always face into the current in order to minimize their profile. By facing into current, crappie can detect any possible prey that is blown in by the current.
The opposing thought involves boat control over deciphering the fish’s actual preference. By fishing into the current, the boat can be inched forward, thereby placing the baits into the lee of the oncoming current and staying in the “strike zone” longer than a boat that is pushed rapidly past the holding area by the prevailing current. Of course, trolling crappie anglers may differ in their presentations from anglers who work a single bait with a single pole.
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