ky lake question

[Nightprowler]

Hey guy's, I got a quick question. I've read where ky lake used to have a majority of white crappie, then changed to a majority of blacks. What was determined the root cause for the change?
Thanks for any info,
NightProwler

[speckfinder]

Water clearing up

[M R Dux]

When I was a kid (too many years ago to mention) it was nothing to pull a noisy aluminum boat up into a patch of buck brush and sit there all day with minnows and bobbers the size of softballs and catch GOOD crappie all day. 20 years a go it was possible to catch good crappie out of buck brush but you had to be stealthy and drop the minnow/jig into small open areas in the brush. Today the water on Barkley and KY are much too clear to regularly catch shallow crappie in buck brush. If you are lucky enough to do so,probably 80% will be blacks. The whites will be out on the deep structure. BTW, 90% of the crappie I catch trolling Bandits are whites.

[Wiskers]

Water clarity & for years nobody knew how to fish for the Blacks. They took over.

[Kentucky Lake]

Most of the Crappie I catch are White Crappie, on Kentucky Lake.

[CrappiePappy]

Prowler ... according to Paul Rister :

(quoted from KDFWR website article) "The longer days of March produce more sunshine to warm the surface of Kentucky reservoirs and signal the crappie to move toward the shallows, build a nest and reproduce. Go now for springtime crappie.
"When the water temperatures hit 57 degrees, crappie move shallow to spawn," said Paul Rister, western fishery district biologist for the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources (KDFWR).
Rister oversees Kentucky Lake, Kentucky’s premier crappie lake. "With the last few mild winters we’ve had, we are now seeing the crappie spawn in mid-March," he explained. "The spawning time for crappie depends on what kind of winter we’ve had and what kind of spring we are having."
The droughts of the late 1980s and early 1990s changed the crappie population on Kentucky Lake. Black crappie now outnumber white crappie because black crappie prefer the clear water caused by the droughts.
"Black crappie also tend to come shallow earlier than white crappie do," Rister said, "often in mid-March ahead of the whites."

... cp

[speckfinder]

Most of the Crappie I catch are White Crappie, on Kentucky Lake.

The last 2-3 years mine have been mostly white as well.

[CrappiePappy]

Catching mostly White Crappie may be a sign that ya'll are still using White Crappie catching techniques & times Doh

maybe a quick read through this - ( Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources - Preliminary Results ) - will help put you on the Black Crappie, as well Thumbs Up

... cp

[Wiskers]

Catching mostly White Crappie may be a sign that ya'll are still using White Crappie catching techniques & times Doh

maybe a quick read through this - ( Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources - Preliminary Results ) - will help put you on the Black Crappie, as well Thumbs Up

... cp

Yep!

[Kentucky Lake]

I want to catch one like this, This Black Crappie was near 4.3 Pounds from KY Lake this Spring.


http://www.parispi.net/content/artic...2346781287.jpg

Kentucky Lake Record Crappie