Crappie Fishing

Crappie habitat is as essential to the health of crappie as homes are to humans. From the first day a fish is born, it spends the rest of its life looking up to find its next meal. Crappie (and all fish for that matter) need areas where they can hide and feel safe. When they find these areas, they'll have a tendency to congregate in the vicinity.

Even if your lake has good habitat, there's no reason (unless there are legal ramifications at your lake) not to make it better and give yourself a bit of an advantage against Ole Papermouth. Lord knows he's got lots of advantages on us! So what exactly is habitat and how can you get your hands on some?

Habitat is defined as, "the type of environment in which an organism or group normally lives ". Nice clinical definition, but what does it mean for crappie? In nature, crappie tend to congregate around weed beds and submerged objects, like trees, pier pylons, and similar structures during daylight hours. During dawn and dusk, they move to more open waters or the shore for feeding. Knowing this, we can create and sink structure that provides the same sorts of cover as grass beds and submerged objects. Here are a number of ways:

1) Christmas trees (real trees only please) - What better way to create artificial trees than sinking real trees!!! Most cities have a special location for dumping trees after the holiday season is over.

2) Tires - I'm not sure how environmentally friendly this option is, but tires make excellent habitat.

3) Pallets - Many, many pallets have been sunk over the years to create fish habitat.

4) Stake Beds - See video below.

5) PVC Structures - creating "trees" out of PVC is also popular in some places.

6) Bamboo in Buckets - This is one that I'm personally looking forward to trying. I just read about this recently and am planning to give this a try next time I get a chance. You place bamboo in a 5 gallon bucket at lots of different angles. You then fill the bucket up with concrete and sink it. If you're using really tall bamboo, you need to build a 2x4 support around the bottom of the bucket (think an large X with the bucket sitting in the middle). Advantages? Bamboo is hollow and will try to float, keeping your structure intact for a very long time. It's also slick on the outside so hooks don't have a tendency to snag the way they do with wood. Also, if you use enough bamboo, even after the leaves are gone, you've got really good structure (see the Stake Beds video).

There are lots of ways to take crappie. From simple cane poles to rods and reels costing hundreds of dollars and everything in between. Then there are yo-yos and jugs, which work very effectively as well. You can basically break it down into four categories: poles or devices, live bait or lures. I've never tried using jigs on devices (yo-yos) so there won't be a section for that.

Live Bait on Poles or Rod and Reel

Rod and Reels are very personal selections, and I'll leave it to you to decide. I prefer a long rod (around nine feet) for reaching into crappie holes and pulling out slabs. However, I've also fished with short rods and even long pieces of cane with fishing line tied directly to the end. They will all produce fish.

As for bait, you can't beat a minnow. Crappie naturally feed on smaller fish, often the small fry of predator species (like bass). In this way they kill two birds (errr.... fish) with one stone. They get a meal and eliminate a fish that will some day want to make a meal out of them! What this means to a fisherman is that, when you offer them a minnow, rigged to look natural, you are offering them what they like to eat anyway. Sounds like a winner.

Many people like to set up a spider rig which consists of several poles and rigs mounted on their boat. In this way, they can troll or drift through an area and have several baits in the water to increase their chances of catching a fish. This is a good method to use when you're not sure where fish are located, at what depth, or what they are biting on. Please note: spider rigging is NOT legal in all states. Please check your local laws before trying this.

Live Bait on Devices

Ah, the "auto reel", today referred to simply as the yo-yo. What a wonderful device. You place it on a tree or dock or even on a jug, attach a bait, set it and let it fish for you.

Correctly attaching and setting a yo-yo is important. Check the video below for the proper method.

Lures on Rod and Reel

This is the type of fishing I do most often because I like to fish with jigs. I've trolled with jigs, fished around piers with jigs and even fished with jigs under bobbers (or floaters if you prefer =). Jigs are simple and relatively inexpensive, which is part of the reason they are so popular. Add to that the fact that you can get them in a rainbow of colors (and I saw one the other day that actually looked like a rainbow of color!!!), and it only adds to the popularity.

I keep a selection of Jigs and a small rod and reel in the trunk of my car for those spur of the moment outings. What jigs do I keep in my trunk? I stick with the smaller jigs and a few select colors. In my neck of the woods, I've found that chartreuse is almost always popular with the crappie, and it is generally the first color I start with. Add to that a chartreuse and black, a black and red, a solid black, a solid white, and a white and red, and you'll have a pretty good selection for nearly any occasion. However, I expect that if you enjoy crappie fishing you'll soon find yourself owning a rainbow of jigs yourself =).

Last year I was bank fishing one afternoon after work, and I got to talking to an old timer whom I'd seen fishing at this particular lake (Lake Pickthorne near Cabot, Arkansas) on many occasions. I caught a nice crappie and made the statement that he was sure gonna taste good when I got him home. This led to a conversation about cooking fish. He started telling me how he cooked them. I asked if I could record it so I could write it down later. He said sure, so I did. Here's the transcript of the conversation.

Me: Ok, it's running now. So you were saying?

Him: Well, I was sayin' there's really only two ways, two right ways, to cook crappie. Beer battered or with corn meal.

Me: I normally cook mine in a corn meal coating.

Him: Yep, that's good. That's how my wife does it. But I like the beer batter better. I think she likes the corn meal cause it's easier, and her pappy always cooked it like that. Her pappy was a mean old SOB, but he sure could cook him some crappie. He got shot back in 55, and he never was quite right after that. Anyways, what he did was put some salt and pepper in some corn meal. Then he'd grab an egg from the hen house and beat it like you'd make scrambled eggs, maybe add a little milk if he had it. He'd put the fish in that and let it sit for a spell. Then he'd roll it around in the cornmeal and toss it in a hot pan with some grease in it. But my woman normally deep fries 'em now-a-days, and that works well enough.

Me: But you say you like them better beer battered?

Him: Oh yeah, nothing tastes as good as a good beer batter. Thing is, you have to eat 'em when they fresh, cause they don't sit around very good after they been beer battered.

Me: What do you put in your batter?

Him: Well now that's top secret. Nah, I'm just kiddin' ya, ain't no big secret. Easy enough. You just need a couple big scoops of flour, maybe a cup. Then you need some salt and pepper and two cans of your favorite beer. I just use the cheap stuff, work good. Mix it all up and make sure the batter is thick, kinda like pancake batter. Now here's the only secret. You gotta make sure your fish is dry before you put it in the batter and you gotta make sure your batter is thick enough. Otherwise when you try to cook it, the batter will slide right off. Fine eatin', mighty fine.

After that the conversation turned to eating crappie more than cooking crappie =).