Thread: Jerry is the Man!!

Here is the story. There was a picture in the paper. Happy reading.


KIRBY — For most anglers, spring is the best time to catch crappie, but if you know where they live, you can catch crappie all year long.

Of course, the best way to know where crappie live is to build their homes yourself and visit them every day. For Jerry Blake of Pearcy, that’s the first, second and third secret to success.

Blake, a former dental lab technician, is one of the few full-time crappie guides in Arkansas. He fishes primarily on Lake Greeson, but also visits lakes Hamilton and DeGray. He doesn’t fish for other species, but he has no downtime in the winter and summer. In fact, his services are in such high demand that he partners with other guides to handle surplus customers.

“We catch them year-round, although some times are better than others,” Blake said. “August is probably our slowest time, the dog days of summer and the coldest part of winter, but we usually catch them any time we go out. If we don’t catch them [customers] dinner, we take them back for free.”

Before it was flooded, the Army Corps of Engineers removed all the trees from the basin that became Lake Greeson. Consequently, the lake has very little natural cover for fish, except for the brushpiles that fishermen like Blake have established. The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission also sinks large brushpiles around the lake.In fact, while I was fishing with Blake on Wednesday, the AGFC’s habitat barge dumped a massive pile of sweet gum branches into the cove at Kirby Marina.

“The Corps doesn’t want us to cut any nut-bearing trees, and those are the best for brushpiles,” said Les Claybrook, an AGFC fisheries biologist. “That leaves us basically with sweet gum and cedar.”

It doesn’t take long for crappie to find a new brushpile, he added. They’ll usually concentrate on it within 48 hours, but they’ll soon abandon it for a couple of months, and then return later.

“Old-time crappie fishermen tell us there’s a ‘souring period’ when fish will leave a brushpile,” Claybrook said. “I don’t really know why, but I think it’s from the decomposition of the leaves turning the water acidic for a period of time.”

For Blake, planting brushpiles is essential to good fishing. He said he spends about 30 days in this pursuit annually. He uses bamboo and brush from hardwoods and cedars, and he sinks brush in a variety of locations and depths to ensure that fish use them throughout the year.

“The shallowest ones we do for spawning are not very tall,” Blake said. “They’re 5 or 6 feet tall, and they’re about 30 foot across, so they’re short and wide.And then we do a medium-size one, bamboo in the bucket, which stands up 8 to 10 foot tall, and a taller one that’s about 15 feet tall.

“They’re usually so big that we just put one by itself in a spot,” he added, “but we’ll have others nearby at different depths, so wecan basically track them up and down.”

Knowing where to place a brushpile is also important. Blake said the best places are in spots where crappie have quick access to much deeper water where they can find food and safety.

“We’re looking for points and drop-offs where there’s deeper water,” Blake said. “They may be at 10 feet, but they’re going to want 20- and 30-foot water around them, especially if they’ve got access to that on more than one side. A slope, creek channel and even just a sloping bank is good.”

Occasionally, Blake said, a brushpile doesn’t land exactly where he wants, or current moves it off a sweet spot, but every one of his brushpiles holds fish.

“I cant think of any cover we’ve put in the lake that we weren’t able to catch fish from,” Blake said. “We have some that ended up deeper than we planned, but we caught fish on them the last two winters fishing down to 35-foot deep. Even then,we thought we’d be fishing in the tops of them, but we ended up fishing in the bottom. In this particular cove, that’s 60 foot deep off the main channel where it’s 80 foot deep, so I don’t know of any brushpiles we’ve put in that aren’t productive at some point.”

Currently, crappie in Lake Greeson are staging for the spawn, Blake said, so they’re relating to brush in shallow and medium depths.

“Right now, the most productive thing is staging beds,” Blake explained. “They’re between deep water, where they stay in the winter and summer, and the shallow areas where they’re spawning. They should be in the 8-12 foot range, but with the goofy weather we’ve had, we’ve been catching them down to 16-18 foot. And we can catch some right now spawning, so the most productive are the holding areas where the majority of them are staging to spawn.”

Crappie anglers in central and south Arkansas have had vigorous discussions lately about the crappie spawn. Some believe the crappie have already spawned on lakes Greeson, DeGray and Ouachita, but Blake said the fish haven’t spawned yet.

“They started spawning early this year, in mid-March,” Blake said, “but the weather got too hot and they quit, and then it got too cold. They’re still full of eggs. If suddenly the weather got hot again and the water got too warm, they would just reabsorb those eggs . Providing we get adequate conditions, which I’m sure we will in next two or three weeks, they’ll spawn again.”

For that, we need stable weather, stable water levels and water temperatures between 62-64 degrees, Blake added. If the water temperatures stay in the 70s, crappie won’t spawn again.

Although other game fish are bigger and arguably more exciting to catch, Blake is an unapologetic crappie fanatic. From the briskness of his business, he’s not alone.

“It’s the hunt, the chase, trying to figure them out,” Blake said. “And, I like eating them. I’d rather eat crappie than anything.”

This article was published Sunday, April 22, 2007.
Sports, Pages 38 on 04/22/2007

Great article. I am going to have to go down there and fish with those guys.

I read it also in today's paper. Very Nice Jerry! Very informative!

Jerry thanks for the article