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| Be assured the executives at G.Loomis Rods know their crappie fishing as well as they do other sports fish. Bruce Holt, the company's executive director, got this paddle-sized beauty out of a lake in Texas.
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The Keys to Catchin' Crappie, Part 4
By Stan Fagerstrom
In the first three columns in this series on crappie fishing I’ve talked about two basics of catching these interesting panfish---locating the schools and fishing at the right depth.
In this fourth column in the series let’s look at the third and equally important aspect of consistent crappie fishing success. It’s to fish your artificial lures at exactly the right speed. Even after you've managed to find the place and depth at which the crappies are concentrated, you're still not going to catch very many unless you know the speed at which your bait or lures must be manipulated to get best results.
What is the right speed? It's not at all involved. What you need to remember is that you simply can't fish too slowly if it's crappie you're after. That might sound simple enough, but some would-be crappie fishermen never do figure it out.
I've fished crappie a few times with a fellow who immediately comes to mind. He's one of those nervous individuals who just isn’t happy unless he's jerking and twitching his rod tip and retrieving his lure so fast a starving barracuda would have trouble catching up with it. That flat won't work where crappie are concerned.
Sometimes the best speed of retrieve for a crappie lure is simply not moving it at all. One of the most effective methods I know to catch crappie under many conditions is to suspend a little jig, fly or miniature plastic grub beneath a float.
Cast your float out where you know the crappie are holding and let it set. Now retrieve it a couple of feet. Then let it rest again.
Now and then, depending on how rippled the surface is, most of your hits come while the lure is seemingly dead in the water. Just the up and down movement the float imparts as it bobs on the surface gives the lure enough movement to attract crappie.
Tiny tube worms, flies dressed with marabou feathers and miniature plastic grubs are all super crappie baits. Use all of these lures with a leadhead of appropriate size and remember that the size isn't always going to be the same.
I prefer to use the lightest leadhead I can get by with and still fish efficiently. I say efficiently, because while I might generally favor a 1/32nd-ounce leadhead, I don't want to use something that falls as slowly as a 1/32nd- ounce leadhead does if the fish are concentrated at 25-feet.
I recall fishing some bushes at one of my favorite lakes one time in the spring. In the spring of the year those bushes almost always held fish. The guy I was with couldn't figure out why I was catching one fish after another while he wasn't getting a bump.
I had given him lures identical to my own.
Finally, knowing something was haywire and wanting to see him get his share of the action, I asked to see his jig. One glance was enough to discover his problem. We were fishing water only three to four feet deep. While the miniature worm he had been using was the same as my own, his jighead was 1/16th-an ounce. Mine was only 1/32nd. What was happening was his bait plunked down to the bottom so fast the crappie didn't have time to find it. As soon as he changed to a leadhead the size of my own he started catching fish.
To an inexperienced crappie fisherman that slight difference in jig size might not seem significant. It was and is. Little things can make a really big difference in any kind of fishing. The sooner you make that discovery, the sooner your catches will increase.
If you have read my book, "Catch More Crappie," you will recall a chapter in which I mentioned the late Tom Jones, of Longview, Washington. I regard Tom as the best all around crappie fishermen I ever met. He went after crappie the way bass nuts go after largemouth.
I used to see Tom regularly on a lake that I often fished for bass.. He had the crappie holding spots pinned down. Every now and then I'd take a break from bass fishing and run by to check how he was doing catching crappie.
I did that one day and thought my eyes were deceiving me. Tom had a pair of burlap bags attached to the side of his boat.
He showed me a couple of fish out of the bag on the starboard side. They were average size fish. Then he reached into the bag attached to the port side. In it he had a bunch of crappie larger than anything I'd seen out of the lake we were on.
I was curious and asked how he had caught those fish. He showed me. He had a small white bucktail fly attached to his leader. The fly was suspended under a float. He simply heaved the float out and then inched it back. Many of his fish were caught when the fly seemed dead in the water.
I've always remembered the tips Tom shared with me. One such tip was certainly how slow you must fish to catch crappie consistently. It's something you also need to remember if you hope to fashion a successful approach to catching them yourself.
In the last four columns I've shared three of the primary keys to successful crappie catching. They aren't something I read about somewhere. They are based on a lifetime of fishing experience. If you want to get more fun out of catching panfish, there's no better time than right now to put them to work in your own angling.
In the fifth and final column in this series we’ll take a look at the best gear for crappie fishing. Watch for it beginning Sept. 1.
To Be Continued |
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| It's essential to slow down where you're throwing artificial lures for crappies. You'll never get your share of these interesting panfish until you do so. |
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