Here’s a crappie tid-bit for ya’ll

Shade. Crappies, especially black crappies, love shade. And this will hold true on clear ice without snow as much as it does on open water. Black crappies from my observations will seek out shaded water almost as if they are bothered by bright sunlight.

If you’re fishing open water on a bright without any structure or wind to create some light diffusion down into the water column, crappies will go deep to seek less bright light. If there is some chop crappies may be found closer to the surface.

If you have some structure on that bright day, submerged wood or a weed line say, crappies will use the weeds as shade and will almost always prefer the shaded water side of the wood. I won’t matter if the wood is horizontal, vertical or anywhere in between, the wood will offer shade if the water and sun conditions allow the light to get to where the crappies are being found.

I can’t count the number of times I have fished dock pilings or bridge pilings or sunken, vertical or horizontal wood, and caught crappies freely on the shaded side of the structures but zip on the sunlit side of the same. I’ve fished unstructured water where a tree line created a well defined line of shade on the water and when a jig/plastic worked thru the sunlit water without a hit got smashed almost immediately upon hitting the shade line on the water. In that wide open water with a shade line, look at the sun’s angle to the water and let your mind see that light penetration and the resulting shade offered, then fish along and down to where that shade is holding fish.

The next time you’re fishing what appears to be well lit open water and getting nothing, search out some shade and give that a go. A bridge, a line of trees a piling, sunken wood, anything to create shade and then fish the darker water.

That makes sense of what I saw last spring. I was fishing a bay with lily pad roots sticking out of the water. And the crappies were only on the shady side of the root ball. Great tip!

Would a deep snow drift provide said cover?

Hmmm Makes laugh, a guy i worked with was a giant of a man . 6,4 -400 PLUS POUNDS . He was retiring and thinking about Florida to winter . His nephew asked him if was gonna get a part time job , selling SHADE ? In reference to crappies you are spot on .

Seen this many times in the spring on bull rush beds. I fish them with the angle of the sun.

suzuki wrote:

Would a deep snow drift provide said cover?

Oh yes. The kicker with drifted snow is that unless you find a drift well away from other snow covered ice, meaning clear, smooth ice, they’ll just develop norm for being under the diffused light that snow creates. Really thick clear ice will have the same affect as snow covered ice.

Another scenario that isn’t quite shade is slightly dirtier water entering a crappie lake that’s relatively clear. On bright days crappies will gravitate to the dirtier water to get away from bright sun. Find that seam that shows the two water colors well defined side by side and you may have found a crappie magnet. That dirtier water may be slightly warmer and could be carrying food too.

What are some of your favorite crappie lures Jimmy, both ice and open water? I find myself the last few years, especially later in the winter and even during the summer chasing panfish more now than I used to. Prolly because of having kids with more. Always looking to add lures to the tackle boxes!

I’ll try to post a picture of some of my favorites tomorrow morning.

weedis wrote:

What are some of your favorite crappie lures Jimmy, both ice and open water?

Without any thinking, these baits are always in my bucket. Never without. Other colors in each of the baits can be found in the bucket but for the sake of brevity, these are profiles I lean heavily on.

From the top: far left and center are 1-1/2″ Do-It Thump-It baits, always with a chartreuse tail regardless of body color. At the right a 2″ Keitech Swing Impact look-alike, always with a chartreuse tail. The bottom row from the left are two Do-It Fry 2-1/4″ baits as they come from the mold, and again always with the chartreuse tails. The third and fourth baits are again based on the 2-1/4″ Fry bait but have eyes and are done in colors closely mimicking small sunfish. On the right a 2″ Do-It Ripper bait.

All of these are fished on jigs ranging from 1/24 ounce to 3/32 ounce and having hooks that range from #6 to #2, depending on the body bulk of the bait. I am big on having a lot of hook showing. All of my jigs have a wire keeper in them to help keep the plastic in place. As a rule, I use either a plain lead head or a variation of purple with blue glitter in it. All of these fish well under floats that I also make, and can be seen here, when conditions dictate a floats use and they swim wonderfully without a float. All of the Fry baits and the Keitech baits are bagged and soaked with Gulp Minnow formula spray.

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Makes total sense as the shade gives the Crappie cover from his food, like wearing camouflage while hunting. Black Crappies are more structure orientated then whites very seldom I have found black Crappies out in open water, it does happen but not very often.

In addition to those soft plastics shown in the picture, I am a super big fan of the Ultralight series Rapala 1- 1/8″ Rippin Rap and the Eurotackle’s 1/16 ounce Z Viber Micro. Not the tiny Z Viber, the 1/16 ounce which is I believe 6/10″ long. Scheels had “big Eye” vibe baits in two sizes that are close to the UL Rapalas and ZVibers just mentioned, that have taken a ton of very healthy crappies too, but I haven’t seen them in a Scheels outside of a discount bin all fall and early winter. Fortunately, I dug thru one such bin and bought all the baits in a couple colors of both sizes that have been outstanding for me in the last couple years.

Both of these get the attention of over-sized crappies, as well as just plain numbers of everyday, run of the mill crappies, when vertically jigged. I prefer a light braid when working these baits. The Clam Frost braid has been on my open water reels for a few years not and I have nothing but praise for the line. I have found that jigging these baits is best done less aggressively and with a solid half-minute pause between the lift-drops. 95% of my hits on these three hard baits come when the lure is absolutely still.

Thanks for sharing and the write up, great info. I used the crappie king plastics on a northland thumper jig last summer with descent success. Some of the crappie king plastics looks to have similar profile as a few in your. I haven’t used much of the rippin raps yet for crappies but did pick up a few that I am going to try, hopefully this weekend.

weedis wrote:

I haven’t used much of the rippin raps yet for crappies but did pick up a few that I am going to try, hopefully this weekend.

Just remember, don’t over work them. Maybe a 4″-5″ lift and drop, then hold still for at least 30 seconds. Most people work these baits to death and set them aside when they have little luck with them.

Thanks Jimmy!

The shade thing makes a ton of sense. Never thought of it before, but I remember during Spring Break while in HS me and 2 buddies went to a lake that had a fishing pier and it was open around the edges of the pier. We could see the crappies sitting under the edge of the ice. When the sun was out they wouldnt bite, but when the clouds came over we pulled them in left and right and they were all dandies. We were not prepared to keep any fish so my buddy took his coat off tied the sleeves in knots and we stuffed them in there. LOL

CaptainMusky wrote:

We were not prepared to keep any fish so my buddy took his coat off tied the sleeves in knots and we stuffed them in there. LOL

Been there myself. lol

I have a location that opens up fairly early in the year where incoming current from a river channel runs. One side of the cut runs back into a bay on an eddy that’s huge under the ice, the other side of the open cut runs downstream until the river flows under ice again and in part creates another eddy on the other shore. Both of these side eddies attract and hold a heavy contingent of really nice crappies long before the main lake sheds its ice.

On warm days I’ll cast a thermometer down about six feet, under a float large enough to support it above water and tease it to run right along the ice’s edge on that side that generally has warmer water. As a rule on a sunlit day, the water there will be about 2 degrees warmer than the water running along the eddy from the other side. The way the sun rises keeps the warmer side shaded well into the early afternoon. Keeping baits running right along the edge of the ice gets an awful lot of crappie attention. People can be ice fishing on the eddy on the other side and not catching a thing, while I, or in the case my buddy is along, we, are busy with catching what I feel are the biggest crappies of the year from this body of water.

Fishing anywhere from two to 8 feet deep along that shaded open water is flat out hot and having the water temp fully two degrees warmer really pulls crappies in since they’ll also like that extra temperature. Any open water adjacent to the ice is warmer water so don’t pass on checking it out and often times that means fishing much deeper than one would think the fish are at.

I fish a lot of Mississippi River marina docks both in the fall/early winter and the spring as soon as a melt opens water around the pilings up. Actually the docks themselves heat up during the day and may have open water under the floats and quite often I see crappies in the shade of under the dock runs along with huge schools of last year’s shad fry which seek that extra couple degrees to soak up some heat. The crappies eat well at these times and most certainly use the shade as an ambush tool.

As an aside here, if the water which you are fishing has a strong sunfish/bluegill population, remember that the adult sizes of these fish have a strong pecking order just like the crappies. Quite often in the dead of winter the most favorable water for the sunfish to find comfort in that which is right on the bottom. Smaller fish based on year class can get pushed up and out of this comfort zone leaving the previous year’s fry at the top of that mass of fish. Large crappies will feed freely on these tiny sunfish, so if a random large mark comes into view right at the top of that sunfish mass, then disappears fairly fast, chances are decent that this is a crappie on the hunt. Try dropping down or raising up to just above where that large mark was made and see if you can’t get the fish to turn and hit.

As another aside, late in the winter/early spring, try fishing immediately under the ice, especially if you see junk come up in the ice shavings from cutting holes. One has to stay quiet and away from the holes so shadows cast don’t spook the fish but I’ve seen tons of crappies taken this way. Tyler Holm and I fished a hard worked backwater community hole by just going from hole to hole that didn’t have a line in it, and we never fished more than six feet deep. Never turned a reel handle. And we caught nice crappie after nice crap[pie, putting all of them right back in the hole. There were maybe thirty people sitting there not catching a thing with lines set to fish all that wiggling mess of dink fish seen on the flashers. e PO a lot of people that morning but not one of them moved to try what we were doing.

you guys are talking to a Crappie legend here. Thank you for all your knowledge Tom! Hope you are doing well friend.

eyeguy507 wrote:

Thank you for all your knowledge Tom! Hope you are doing well friend.

Doing well considering my age and this wonderful heat spell we are currently having. Thanks for asking!

Tom, er, I mean ‘Jimmy’, do you use FFS in your pursuit of crappies? The reason for the question is because so much of what you write about collaborates with what FFS has revealed to us over the years. If the answer is ‘no’ then that is remarkable and shows the amount of time you’ve invested in this passionate pursuit.

For us, one of the last frontiers in crappie fishing has been what they tend to do as night falls. We’re finding that during the cold water periods just before ice up, and again just after ice out, black crappies will often rise up and hunt very high in the water column after dark, often at the surface. They also tend to spresd out more, seemingly drifting aimlessly around in small loose pods searching for forage. Big ones are often loners.

In the case of expansive shallow weed bays, which many agree harbor the biggest of the big crappies year round, this propensity to rise up high in the wster column after dark, provides an opportunity to sharp-shoot some of the largest fish in the system. The presence of bright lights on docks or exceedingly bright yard lights will create a pattern within a pattern here. So, watch for that opportunity.

Okay, I’ve already said too much but do appreciate the wisdom shared by folks here.

Brian…. to give you an idea of how slow I am, what is FFS?

I journaled every crappie I caught on a local lake for 22 years. The barometer reading, air temp at start and end of outing, water temp at surface and at 6 feet at the start and end of the trip, wind and direction, water color, and general conditions of the lake [i.e. higher than normal pool] and recent rainfall. Every crappie I kept was weighed, measured, sex determined, white/black or cross of the two, and aged thru dyed scale samples in addition to the other info. I also added any other info that I thought as unusual or odd for the trip or if a crappie or two was caught in an odd circumstance, jig/plastic color and or whether bait was used and finally the time of the catch of each fish. When this was done over those years the latter 12 years I had a cheap flasher to allow me to see the basic depth of the water. At the onset of this gathering of info I was a minnow person. About 5 years into it I started with plastics in the early spring and never bought a minnow for crappies again. Or a bug of any kind. I’m at 39 years since I have bought bait for any panfish.

Another thing I did was to carry a simple paper punch. If I got into a fury of activity over one location I’d punch a hole on the dorsal before returning the fish to the water. Its amazing how many fish I could catch in an hour that would have up to three holes punched.

From all of this I have narrowed my fishing time to an hour before the sun cracks the horizon until the sun just is fully visible along the horizon. If trees/hills/clouds are present and block the true horizon, then I am on the water a little later. Evening fish, as you have alluded to Brian, is enhance when dock or yard lighting is cast on the water. Minnows are pulled to this lighting as are insects by the drove and crappies are more than happy to chow on them.

As I have mentioned earlier, big crappies will push smaller crappies to the outside of the big crappie’s space. I fish from the top down in the water column and start generally at about four feet. There are times I get hit before the bail is closed and I will adjust the initial depth to see what the fish size is up high. If the fish at the top are smaller, I start fishing down a foot at a time until I find larger fish. So many people start deep and often drag smaller, struggling fish thru the area where larger fish are present, and this can spook the big fish away or they shut off. By fishing down, you also can determine whether the fish are hitting head-on or rising to hit.

I’m big on water temperature at certain times of the year and use a stream thermometer suspended on a length of surveyor’s cord. I generally take water temps at 6 feet to start, but when I get fish deeper than that I’ll often take time to see what the temp is at the depth they’re hitting at. I’m on my fifth thermometer. I’ve never broke one but have worn the etching off the glass barrels so reading got hard to do. Few crappies are taken off the stern of a boat where most water temps are taken from pucks of the electronics. Core water temps tell a far greater tale than surface waters when one is after sizable crappies and a single degree can make a huge difference.

Location-wise, I have noticed that specific water at specific depths attract crappies at immediate ice out and will also hold numbers of crappies in the same general area and at the same water temps just prior to ice up. Likewise, crappies will generally use the same or similar areas during the heat of summer and the coldest portion of the winter.

My most consistent large crappie catching comes within a couple weeks of immediate ice out. Late fall is also another big crappie period for me. I no longer ice fish but when I did I loved the thin ice in areas where the fall bite was going wild or on crap ice right where I knew the immediate ice-out bite would happen. After my third dunking I figured I better just stay off the ice.

I make my own jigs and I inject my own plastics. I am super fussy about my floats and make them as well. Asked what my favorite plastic color is, I reply “anything with a chartreuse tail”. I start looking for the larger crappies to begin spawning at about 60 degrees in water that is at least six to seven feet deeper than the usual run-of-the-mill crappies. The deeper water is far more temperature stable and stays clearer should influx of dirty water occur. I’ve learned to pay attention to what the elements around me telling me and I pay very close attention to what the fish are telling me. If I had only one piece of information that I think would make a difference to anyone’s fishing, it would be to either take a spiral notebook, pencils, a tape measure and a stream thermometer on a ten foot dropper to the water with you and record the pertinent things that each tool is meant to do. Writing this info down will NOT be forgotten and over time one can begin to see correlations that will help put together more successful fishing adventures.

One stark thing I have learned about crappies is that they can go from being in a near frenzy hitting at will to dead negative in a heartbeat. For no visible reason at all. It’s not you the angler. It’s not the bait. It’s not the water temperature. Its the fish. And the really big boys can be a bear to figure out.

The biggest advantage they have as a predator is their low light vision-twilight dark, shade it all helps them.

Front facing sonar/ live imaging

Great info, and thinking back lots of truth to the shade. I’ve been using Keitech swim baits for several yrs, not much on the chartreuse tails but trying to match the lake shiners so I’ve been using the black shad. Super soft with great movement but being soft they get ripped up fast, having a wire keeper jig is a must. So you soak yours yet even having a smelt scent? Might try that. Thanks. And never thought of putting one under a bobber..

Swimjiggin wrote:

Great info, and thinking back lots of truth to the shade. I’ve been using Keitech swim baits for several yrs, not much on the chartreuse tails but trying to match the lake shiners so I’ve been using the black shad. Super soft with great movement but being soft they get ripped up fast, having a wire keeper jig is a must. So you soak yours yet even having a smelt scent? Might try that. Thanks. And never thought of putting one under a bobber..

I’m making my own Keitech look-alikes so there’s no scent involved in the making. I store every one of these baits either in a jar of Gulp minnow juice or a ziplock with the same.

If you look back in this thread you’ll see a pic of the floats I make and use. These thin worms are just nuts with action under a float when there’s even just a hint of wave action or chop. And the factory baits do not come with chartreuse tails.

You got it going on that’s for sure. The one in the upper right looks spot on to Keitechs. The only downfall to the black shad is the shortest is 2.8, the big crappies have no problem but it would be nice if one could replicate it shorter.

Reading your input from before is one of the reasons I started coming around ido. Thank you for all the info you share.

Bearcat89 wrote:

Reading your input from before is one of the reasons I started coming around ido. Thank you for all the info you share.

Thanks!