Overlooked patterns for early season crappie...

By:Chuck Anderson

Remember sitting with your dad in the boat on a early spring morning casting small jigs and plastics in search for some post spawn walleye then all the sudden BAM! It feels like a walleye bite but it’s not a walleye its one of those huge Midwest crappie.

Yes folks! Spring isn’t just the time for walleye fishing it’s also a great time of year for crappie. I can’t believe how overlooked these fish are in April and May. So many fishermen get this idea in their head that once ice fishing is over so is crappie fishing. At least until those balmy summer afternoons when you are hanging over a weed bed and every cast is a slab.

I can share with you a little secret that will put some slabs in the boat as well as maybe a few Walters as well. We are going to spend a little time discussing an early season technique that is very productive in cool water both clear and stained.

Crappie are schooling fish which tend to always hang together whether to feed or to spawn once you catch one get that line back in, there’s going to be plenty more where that came from. Crappie, both black and whites can be very aggressive if a bounty of forage is present. I have casted small brown trout flies weighted down with a split shot right in the middle of May fly hatches and just hooked up into a bounty of crappie.

The first thing you need to look for is structure and then food. Structure for crappie can be a dock, a shallow weed bed in a warm bay or a single boulder in 15 feet of water. Sounds like Walleye territory right? Well you are right! Crappie and walleye tend to have a very similar structure and feeding pattern.

Early in the season you can’t go wrong with a small jig tipped with a fine plastic trailer. This has worked for me because it imitates small fry and larva that tend to rise from the bottom out of these shallow weed beds at this time of year. I like to suspend my jigs with a slip bobber rig 2 feet over these beds and then hang on because these fish prefer to rise for a meal. Using a slip bobber rig will save you time as well because depending on how deep you are fishing, you can slightly adjust your depth to match the strike zone that these fish are biting. Another method I prefer is gently swimming a small minnow style plastic over these beds, which tends to bring out the more, larger, aggressive slabs. Just cast, varying your depth on the return with a nice even retrieve, as soon as you feel that quick tick on the line set the hook!

Don’t be afraid to play around with different colors and plastic trailers, remember all bodies of water are different but the movements and feeding habits of these fish remain consistent.
Locating a school of crappie is very exciting because they are very unique by the way they school. Crappie schools can easily be seen by the way they form a pyramid style shape on your electronics. I remember taking a client our for a half day trip for slabs on Lake Delavan in southern Wisconsin when my eyes were drawn to a perfect triangle shaped image on my Garmin depth finder. I immediately marked the spot with my marker and slowly drifted past not to interrupt the school. My client said why are we stopping here? I advised him that I found our fish for the afternoon and proceeded to show him the image on the screen.

With a look of doubt on his face he said that he has always seen that before on his boat and was sure it was just a pod of bait fish. So we rigged up with some small jigs and plastic trailers and proceeded to cast toward the marker. Wham! First cast he hooked up on a nice 12 inch slab. This presentation proceeded to produced well into the afternoon.

Don’t be afraid to cast through the middle of a school like this, it can be deadly. The fish are schooled up like this to feed and trap minnows like a moving net. This is a perfect example of how these fish feed. So go out and grab your favorite ultra light rod and start looking for those schools and you will be surprised how much action you will have with very minimal effort.