Water levels and Crappie?

[jwmac]

I fish at lake milwood near ashdown and after all of these heavy rains the river get up and flowing and puts a current in the side lakes. How does this affect the bite? How does it change what I'm looking for. Just trying to learn. Thanks for any info.

[no1son]

Crappies will very quickly move up into newly flooded areas IF there is a good route into them from areas they were already using. Last spring on one local lake the water levels had come up high enough that they were even spawning in places that had been dry enough for some years to stand on fishing for them. If those new areas include tall shoreline grasses or flooded willows you may have to go in amoung the roots to find the fish, although they will often tend to use the bit more open edges of those plant stands. They find these spots very quickly compared to many species.

A crappie is a crappie is a crappie! Like any other mobile schooling, flocking or herding species they will follow patterns in their movements, using specific types of markers to guide them and lead them to feeding and scatter points and on seasonal migrations. It is instinct and they are ruled by it. Not always easy patterns to work out, since in shallow waters they respond pretty quickly to temperature changes, but if it were easy there wouldn't be any more crappies.

Once you get to the specifics there are some relatively subtle differences between black crappies and white crappies that are important, specifically that whites tend to move more horizontally and blacks more vertically; so whites may well be more related to open water areas. Without knowing for sure, I would have to guess that the open water stretches necessary for spider rigging produce more white crappies than blacks. It really seems that way from the pictures spider riggers post anyway.

IMO they continue to feed at all temperature ranges, at least in the cooler part of those or we would not catch so many of them through the ice. What happens is that temperature changes controll how readily they bite and how they move into feeding areas.

[jwmac]

thanks no1son for the info. I'm new to the crappie hunt and trying to figure out how to find them.