Hello crappie gurus! I'm a new guy here. I'm a long time bass tournament guy from Kentucky and Barkley Lakes. With 3 kids now, I've basically gotten away from bass tournament fishing the last 4 or 5 years and have resorted more to just going after whatever is biting best for fun. I usually spend the spring following the bass spawn cycle, the summer trolling for white bass and sauger and occasionally running trotlines for catfish, and then the fall I deer hunt and then spend the winter duck hunting. Crappie fishing is one thing that's missing from my activities, and I'd like to change that. In the past I just couldn't ever put the bass rod down and switch over to crappie, I'm trying to change that now.

Doug Wynn gave a great seminar this past weekend in Murray, I'm definitely going to try some of the things he does with regard to longlining, planer boards, and trolling cranks for crappie once the water gets a little warmer.

In the meantime, I want to try and tackle spider rigging. I tried it once, got highly tangled up multiple times, and very frustrated, and haven't tried it since. I'm going to try it again, with that being said are there some good go-to instructional articles, or videos, or old posts on this website that would help out a newbie? I'd like to know the basic strategies to use, how to deal with wind, and the most common riggings for live bait and artificial for spider rigging.

With bass fishing, water temp was pretty much the baseline for what you used and where you started looking for bass, are crappie the same way? For crappie is it like 40-50 degrees you spider rig, 50-60 you longline, and 60+ you troll?