Fish & Tackle: Follow Crappie To Deep Winter Hunts

By Vic Attardo

 

After watching the leaves fall for some two hours, I was wondering if this would be one of those unfortunately fishless late autumn days. According to the sonar screen, the surface water was 47 degrees. Then the sun, which had been hiding behind thick clouds, popped out and as the boat drifted over a 17-foot basin, I felt a strong downward tug. I worked a 14-inch crappie from the water. That first fish came just after 11 a.m. following an 8:30 launch.

As the clouds parted and sun jewels began to glisten on the surface, a solitary swallow started dinking and dunking just above the lake. I tightened my grip on the rod anticipating a change in fortune. Another hard pull was telegraphed up the line and another beautiful 14-inch black crappie soon splashed by the boat.

I didn’t have to wait long for the next bite or for a lot more bites after that. By 2 p.m., I had caught more than 25 crappie, including many no-doubt keepers. A nothing day had turned into something special. As the sun began a fast slant drop in the November sky, the bite also cooled. The action came to a grinding halt about the same time the sun sank behind the forested shoreline. I’ve never seen or even heard of an evening or night crappie bite at this time of year. When the water starts to chill, it seems to put the fish down.

That’s the way it often is with late-fall crappie fishing when “come late, leave early” might serve as a good motto. It’s an anomaly, of sorts. During ice season, there’s often an evening crappie bite and a great night bite that has more to do with light penetration.

Before the water ices over, there is another constant: crappie go deeper as air and water temperatures drop.

In early fall, I catch crappie 8 to 12 feet down in mid-size lakes. In mid-fall, the optimum range is usually 10 to 15 feet give or take a foot here and there. As Thanksgiving approaches and into a few pre-ice days in December, the crappie may bite at 17 to 25 feet.

As last November progressed, I caught crappie in depths from the upper teens to mid-20s in lakes with significant basins. This made fishing easier as a hydrologic map and the boat’s sonar gave solid clues to the basins whereabouts.

Crappie anglers who do well through the warmer months fishing around shallow weed beds and shoreline deadfalls may want to adjust their thinking as fall settles in.

I was on a northern lake of roughly 100 acres the day I caught upwards of 25 crappie; the same structures apply in larger lakes. Sometime before that, I was fishing a 1,450-acre lake in southeast Pennsylvania that held a solid population of Black crappie. It was early November and everything was still in Technicolor. In any part of November, it’s good if a lake has a number of basins 18 to 22 feet deep. Such basins typically have a soft bottom and you may see tell-tale rings of emerging insects rising to the surface.

The best tactic to work these depths is vertical jigging. A 3/16-ounce roundhead jig gets the bait down with a moderate drop rate. I add a soft plastic straight-tail minnow in silver and blue and drop the jig right under the boat. After it falls about 10 feet, I begin to feather the line until the jig reaches bottom. Feathering is accomplished by simply pressing and releasing the line as it loops off the face of a spinning reel or letting the line run between your thumb and index finger. I try to maintain a moderate-speed fall from 10 feet down to the bottom.

When the jig hits bottom, the line coils at the surface. When I see this slight coil, I reel the jig up with two turns of the reel handle, enough to raise the jig slightly off bottom. The jig will then glide along following the boat’s movement on the surface. I may move the boat with intermittent bursts of an electric motor but prefer a light, steady breeze.

To impart action in the jig and soft plastic, keep a tight line and raise and lower the rod tip with an action no more pronounced than the flicking of a wall light switch. This produces a controlled jigging action that lifts and drops a deep jig less than a foot.

As I drifted over the first school on the sonar in the large lake, it soon became apparent that those cold crappie were not going to react to any more jigging action than that.

If I lifted the rod tip several inches up and down, the fish ignored the jig. But the oh-so-slight action, again no more than the flicking of a light switch, had the crappie striking hard. A little wrist action was all it took.

Because of the depth of the crappie, I do not worry about the boat’s shadow, the slap of waves against the aluminum hull or anything else that might spook crappies at a shallower depth.

To detect deep takes, keep that line as straight as possible. If the line bows or enters the water at a pronounced slant, reel up quickly and drop the jig in a fresh presentation. A straight line is paramount for both working the jig and feeling a bite.

Paying attention to these details got me into a mother lode of crappie in one basin. The light breeze was in the right direction to push the boat slowly across a wide, deep flat. When I saw a hump of sonar readings nearing underneath the boat, I remember thinking, “Get ready.”

The crappie were in a feeding mood, and by maintaining slight jigging action, I was able to trigger and detect their strikes. When up hits occurred—when a fish nabbed the bait and swam up in the water instead of down or away—the line briefly went slack. I was staring at the line with such intensity that if the short length of line between the rod tip and water surface formed the slightest curve, I lifted and reeled hard until I felt the weight of the fish.

For this work, I like a low-stretch monofilament with a 3- to 4-foot fluorocarbon leader. I connect the two with a surgeon’s loop, but there is nothing wrong with a tiny black barrel swivel as long it does not interfere with the drop of the jig.

A friend insists on live minnows and a bobber for crappie. In late fall he does well with the minnow at the same depths I’m targeting, but in the time it takes him to replace each lost minnow, I’m already back in the water teasing the next fish.

He prefers medium shiners instead of the smaller fatheads I’ve seen other bait fishermen use. When I fished with Southern crappie anglers using spider rigging, they went with smaller fathead minnows. Rosy Reds were a favorite as the color stood out in dingy water.

The shiners my friend uses are about 3 inches long, wide bodied and full of kick. The minnow provides all the action he needs. It’s important to add a small slip shot about 8 inches above the hook to prevent a large shiner swimming up for the surface.

To release crappie he doesn’t want to keep, he uses circle hooks and impales the shiners just in front of their dorsal fins. Since the point of a circle hook is curved inwards getting that point past a shiner’s tough scales can be problematic. My friend uses his thumbnail to scrape the scales off the skin where the point will be. Again, all this takes time and my feeling is that if crappie are hitting a soft-plastic, go with the easier game. Also, crappie may grab a minnow, run, and then drop it. With a tight line and the hook of my soft plastic exposed, I get much quicker hook-sets.

To be fair, my friend does catch some fine largemouth bass with the live shiners. My little jig and soft plastic trailer only interests a few smaller bass. For kids or other inexperienced anglers who have trouble detecting and reacting quickly to a deep take on soft plastic, the shiner and float rig is definitely the way to go.

Sophisticated live-view sonars have dispelled a misconception held by crappie anglers for a long, long time.

Because their eyes appear to be pointing up, many anglers believed that a crappie would ignore anything beneath eye level. I’m probably guilty of repeating this false dictum myself.

When I fished with a highly skilled South Carolina angler who had an extravagantly sophisticated sonar unit, it quickly became obvious that crappie do, indeed, take a bait below their eye level. Think of all the crappies caught with bottom-hugging presentations, and it must be true.

I will add a caveat for late fall crappie in deep water. On a calm day drifting over an 18- to 21-foot basin, I watched pods of crappie on the sonar screen follow my jig and soft plastic down to the bottom, where they hit hard. But to get strikes after that, I needed to tease the jig up a foot or two.

Even on my basic sonar, I could see crappie gather round the jig, even peck at it along the bottom, but not until I teased the bait up with a slow jiggling lift did they take a full swipe at it. This slow lift was almost the same action I impart while ice fishing.

So, there is something to be said about a crappie’s added willingness to take a bait that’s over its head.

The big take away with November crappie is that you need to go progressively deeper as the season lengthens and the water cools.

You also need to entice the crappie with subtle jigging and not enthusiastic rod-pumping. If you jig like the tail sweeping back and forth below one of those silly kitchen cat clocks, you’re definitely jigging too hard.