Several crappie.com'ers have asked me when I was going to start writing again. Well, the weather has not been very condusive for fishing lately and of course that doesn't mean I'm not thinking about fishing. So, I wrote this article to stay busy. For many, it is basic but for some I sincerely hope it helps you catch more fish.

You can read it from my website at -- http://www.familyfishingtrips.com/News.htm

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PREDICTING CRAPPIE BEHAVIOR

It’s the middle of January, the weather is less than favorable most days and springtime crappie catching overwhelms your mind most of the time. Not only are you captivated by the quantity promised by the coming spawning season, but also you know fishing during the winter months in colder waters can reap quality fish. You know it’s important to get on the water as much as possible to establish and maintain a dominant pattern - to follow the fish. But, there are many obstacles – the crappie widow you’re married or espoused to, the commanding schedules of the kids, the j-o-b, more weather, etc. Daily lake excursions are the best, but that’s genuinely unrealistic. So, you go as often as you can and you find that reading about how to put a pattern together is easier than actually finding it the particular day you’re fishing.

Is it possible to actually and accurately predict the crappie’s behavior? Ultimately and emphatically, no, not with any take it to the bank certainty! The minute you think you’ve got them figured out, you learn the fish we love so much has fooled us again. There are so many variables when taken altogether would take the world’s largest super-computer a decade to figure out a potential pattern. Though norms may exist, truly the two most unpredictable things in the world are human nature and mother nature.

So, do we give up or find a way? I say, find a way. Develop a method that will point you in the right direction and improve the odds. Willie Mays once said, “It isn’t hard to be good from time to time…What’s tough is being good every day.” Start with the conceptual and narrow it into the concrete. Often, predicting crappie behavior is like painting a work of art. You start by brushing on the background and one step at a time you add more and more detail. Eventually, you make the last brush stroke and sign your name to the masterpiece.

The acronym M.I.L.K. is one way to remember the factors you should consider when predicting crappie behavior:
Movement – know how crappie move and where they live
Influences – know what affects crappie
Likes and Dislikes – know the norms and when crappie stray from them
Knowledge – learn, adapt and succeed

Movement

Crappie seasonally migrate between deep and shallow water using submerged channels. Identify these primary and secondary channels using maps and sonar units. Develop a “mental” map of where the channels are and how they run. Learn where the bends and holes are in the channel. Find where the channel has sharp drop-offs and sloped banks. Granted, this may be more easily accomplished with some bodies of water than others, but crappie must move and will do so within a chosen path. Find it. The crappie are not just there scattered everywhere. If you haven’t heard this clever proverb before, I’ll enlighten you now, “ninety-percent of the fish can be found in ten-percent of the water.” Being very familiar with the highway the fish use to move in and out of their haunts is not only the start to predicting crappie behavior; it’s the very foundation that supports all the other factors.

As the seasons change, crappie will move to shallow water in spring and fall and deep water in summer and winter. Of course, shallow and deep is unique to each body of water. Some impoundment’s deep water may not exceed 12ft., whereas some reservoir’s deep water might easily surpass 40ft. In either situation, the principle still applies. That which attracts and guides the crappie out of the relatively deep water channels and into the shallower water is structure and cover. And, the crappie will relate to structure and cover. Structure is underwater geography. Often and understandably, the term structure is mistakenly used interchangeably with the term cover. You cannot see structure because it’s under water. Fishfinders, depthfinders, sonar units, whatever you want to call them, is the only device that will give you a look at the structure. Structure is the channel itself, points, ledges, humps, holes, flats, even rock piles. Cover is what sits on the structure. Hardwood brushpiles, bamboo “crappie condos,” artificial fish habitats, tree lay-downs, stumps and cypress knees are all examples of cover. When cover is placed on unique structure, there you will attract, find and catch fish. There is cover that you see above the water level and cover the crappie see submerged below the surface. Most crappie anglers fish visible cover that looks good to them. But, focusing your attention on the submerged cover can ultimately be more productive.

Influences

After grasping the concept of “how” crappie move, the next step in predicting their behavior is to consider “what” the factors are that actually cause the movement. The first three that come to my mind are: water level, water temperature and water clarity. And, all three are absolutely tied together, one affecting the other. This is where the dynamic of predicting behavior becomes more complex and intuition, experience and just good ole hard work is necessary.

Water level is the first factor that influences movement. Low water levels concentrate the fish. High water levels scatter the fish. But what influences their movement is the rise and fall of the water level. During a change in water level the crappie will transitionally move from one spot to another. Sometimes shallower, sometimes deeper, sometimes at the same depth, but they will move. They will not stop making moves until the water level stops changing.

Here’s one possible scenario that demonstrates how water level influences you and the fish. It’s Saturday morning and you arrive at the lake and find it is low and off its banks. So, immediately you conclude that the mid-depth staging beds you caught a limit of crappie on three weeks ago might be too shallow to fish but you start with them anyway. Good choice. You catch a few but if your graph isn’t lying to you, the fish just aren’t stacked up like you’d like to see them. The day’s trip is half over by now, so you spend the rest of your time working deeper brushpiles and the fishing slowed even more. You only end up with half your limit this trip. You tell yourself the fish just weren’t biting well today, but when you get home your neighbor has a limit of monster slabs. After scratching your head and interrogating him, you find out he caught them on some of the shallower brushpiles you and he put in about a year ago. Your final conclusion is he zigged when I zagged, them’s the breaks. Nope, what your neighbor knew and you didn’t is though the lake still looked low, six days earlier the lake had actually come up 8-inches and had stabilized in the last few days. The rise in water level put more water over your shallow brushpiles allowing the crappie to invade them at a depth they wished to suspend. Keep a close eye on the day to day history of lake level changes. It will influence where you find the fish.

Water temperature is another factor that will influence not only movement but also location. In general, extreme water temperatures, the very cold (50 degrees and colder) and the very warm (80 degrees and warmer) cause crappie to move into deeper water. And, when the water temperature is between 50 and 80, they can be found in the mid-range and shallow depths. Just like a change in water level causes crappie to move, it is the change in water temperature that triggers movement. Falling temperatures in winter and rising temperatures in summer move the crappie deeper. Rising temperatures in spring and falling temps in autumn move the crappie shallower. These are the norms and by no means dictate where the crappie will be. It is important that you scout fish different depths in all seasons and water temperatures.

Here’s an example that I personally experienced several years ago before I started guiding. It was late winter and I knew the crappie would start making their move to the shallows soon. All I had to do was, watch the water temperature and follow them. I was determined to be the first on the lake to catch crappie in shallow water that year. Week one, the surface temp is 49. Week two, the surface temp is still 49. As the weeks past, the temp slowly climbed. After about 6 or more weeks the surface temperature of the water in the main part of the lake had finally reached 58 or 59. Okay, now’s the time. The crappie should be moving into the shallows, making their beds and getting ready to spawn. So, here I go, weaving in and out of stumps, avoiding sandbars to check the shallows. When I get there the water temperature is 69 teetering on 70. What?! I almost missed the entire spawn and definitely didn’t catch the first crappie moving into the shallows.

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