Follow post-spawn crappie back to deep water the same way you followed them into the shallows

Millions of words are written annually about the process of catching crappie as they move out of deep water toward the spring spawn.

But what happens when crappie fishing spawning? Many fishermen put up their crappie rods when the spawn ends, so they don’t know how fish get back tot he palaces where they spend late-spring and summer.

Catching post-spawn slabs, at least at Lake Hartwell, is no big problem, according to guide Steve Pietrykowksi.

“When crappie go back out, they go right back to the places they came from,” he said. “They follow the same route right back out that they used to come in.”

And that “route” is the series of brush piles they used as waypoints on the way into creeks from the main lake and from the creek channels to the shallow, spawning flats.

When Hartwell’s crappie leave the bank, Pietrykowski starts checking brush piles in 10 to 15 feet of water along nearest creek channel. As the post-spawn progresses, he’ll move back out of creeks, looking for them around deeper brush piles as they head for deep, main-lake areas.

But he’ll treat them differently.

“If I can mark fish around brush, I’ll throw a marker buoy on it, and if they’re in 10 to 15 feet of water, I’ll stay off to the side so I can cast a minnow under a float or swim a jig past it,” he said.

“You need to set up on the downwind side; you want to cast past it and have it drift back over the brush. If there’s no wind, you have to pull it.

“When you find them on brush in 20 to 25 feet, you can — a lot of the time — you can sit right on top of the brush and fish a live minnow straight down.”

Pietrykowski likes to use light braid on his slip-cork rigs because it floats better and allows the minnow to fall more slowly into the strike zone.

“It seems to me to use braid with a slip cork because it floats better,” he said. “The line stops on the surface instead of sisnking. When you fish fluorocarbon on a topwater plug, it will drag it down, and it’s the same thing with a minnow. It sinks it faster.

“Plus, on a spinning rod and reel, braid doesn’t twist as much.”