Crappiola!

Just got in off the lake shore. Fishing was pretty good again. Actually the fishing this spring is the best we ever had. Crappie numbers are not up to some previous per outing counts, but the size of the crappies and the size and number of bonus fish is something we have never had before.

We checked out a dock that had been good last fall from something like 4 to 5:30 for a measily couple of sunnies; so we moved. On the next lake shore from a bit before 6 to about 8:45 for a bit of a different story. A couple of smallish crappies early, and lost bonus bass that could have been 5 pounds, and then real quiet. All through the evening the pool was just filled with 2" sunnies apparently feeding on a hatch of real tiny insects, which attracted some big eaters. A couple of muskies fed heavily around the pool for the next hour or so. There must have been 2 dozen major boils with the little sunnies scattering every which way. We saw one 3' muskie come swimming through and we had one cutoff in that period. There was a loon feeding there, a grebe, and a couple of merganzers; no question the forage was all over the place, but the crappies and even the bigger sunnies were keeping their heads down. We went through a dozen lure changes all to no avail. We actually saw the loon swimming under water past our feet a couple of times. Those birds can really move down there. It's quite a sight.

Finally as witching hour came on, also known as prime time, that time after the sun has gone down but before full dark, I dug out the Pearl Baby Shad, and we started to connect. The last half hour produced another ten crappies for an evening total of 19 between us. These last crappies were all 9/10" and more, including a couple of 12"s, a 13" and my personal best to date in the Metro a 14". The evening ended for me with a 2' pike and my partner with our last crappie, sort of a mixed double.

As I as landing the pike, some acquaintances showed up and put out fatheads under bobbers. While we were there they only took one fish, but that slab crappie measured 15 1/2". That was a horse! These are all internal Metro fish not some hidden place in the deep woods.

Temp was 50 degrees and dropping; so we were getting cold. There was no wind, the lake surface was close to glassy, no clouds and very bright, until the sun went down. The water in the second lake was also very clear on the second lake. Total time on the water was a bit over four hours. All fish we take in the Metro are released.

All in all not a bad evening, not bad at all, for all that it started slow.

Very envious..... Have tried tonka, bush, bryant, and shady oak..... Assuming do not count (my granddaughter insists they can spell), has not been very good to me from shore so far. Just bought a new tube, think i will wait a month and then try.

No question but that this has been an abnormal spring up here. We have had to do quite a bit of adjustment to find our fish. So far nearly all of our fish are shoreline fish, not even the docks have started to produce very well yet. With the early iceout with its abnormally warm temperatures, the crappies came out into open water on pre-spawn shallow runs early and in very good shape, but then we reverted to seasonably normal temperatures scattering those runs. Now they are far more occasional catches than they would have been in most previous years.

Curiously we have yet to take a colored-up male this year, all our crappies with one possible exception were normally colored, black crappies; so if they are bedding around here already we have not found those spots. I don't think they have started yet, and may not for some time. Normal bedding time is deep into May and the return to seasonable temperatures in recent weeks may have interrupted an earlier than normal start. If so some of these fish will not recondition and may already be reverting to post spawn patterns, which shakes things up a whole lot. It will all depend I guess on how many of the males respond to the weather yo-yo they have been through and recondition toward a spawning behavior. Not all of them will. Every time weather interrupts male conditioning toward spawning patterns, some of the males give up and don't retry. That is true all over crappie range, which is why so many crappie waters have dominant year classes. The males only have so much retry in them, and since they make the beds, their ability to cope controls the yearly spawning success. It seems to me the females are far more flexible in their response to weather and remain willing far past the point that the males give up on bedding. It may well be that if too many males give up the females may tend to remain on spawning assembly points still wishing to dance well after normal spawning periods expire and the male have moved into post spawning patterns.

Crappies seem to me to be far less concentrated and more mobile this spring than in previous years. We have to keep moving and trying out different presentations to find them. Admittedly my partner and I have been working over some of these spots almost daily when the weather permits for the better part of a decade; so we know some of them pretty intimately right down to very specific holding spots and movement routes. But they are not using them in the same patterns as in previous years. There is far less concentration than we are used to and those that we find are actually using different times of the day, too. A whole lot of folks using traditional presentations and expecting traditional patterns are having a bunch of trouble finding crappies this spring or finding expected concentrations of them anyway. That includes my partner and me. We have had to adjust pretty dramatically to find any kind of numbers at all and what we have found are not up to expectations either.

There is an additional factor in that the big eaters among the game fish, bass, walleyes, pike and muskies have also come out from under the ice early and in better than normal condition due to the very early ice out and they are feeding heavily and shallow almost certainly having a scattering effect on early concentrations and movements of the smaller crappies. Last evening in one crappie spot I had a very nice bass on that threw the hook and something large enough that I couldn't move it on until it cut me off before we ever saw even a sunnie much less a crappie. Between us we only managed some half dozen crappies for some hours on the water, and my two were dinks. My partner's biggest was 12", and one almost 10 but the rest of his were true dinks, too. This time of year we are used to numbers per hour and more than we are getting in complete outings this spring.

We have never before seen so many truly large gamefish of so many kinds in traditional spring crappie spots nor in some cases true slab crappies actually foraging with them in what seem to be mixed groups, not true however when there are muskies around. Everything avoids the adult muskies, even when they do not necessarily avoid each other. We are coming to expect those bonus fish, which will certainly cut off here very soon as they move through their own spawns and into post spawn patterns, and that will be a jolt for us. In the mean time we are racking up some personal bests like the 25" walleye that saved my outing last evening. We even had a direct report of a 9# even largemouth bass from this spring for another person also fishing for crappies. State record were the season open if it could have been certified in season, but the fish had to be released, of course. The best we have had in that regard was the 23" bass my partner took on his crappie presentation earlier. At about 7 1/2 pounds that is his personal best, too.

That is bonus fish quality that we have never seen before in spring crappie fishing. Way beyond anything we have ever seen before! True slab crappies are mixed in with them very often as well, and we are finding that very, very interesting as well as truly awe-inspiring.

FWIW we each carry three or four differently rigged ultralight rods on each trip which is normally late afternoon into evening, and are constantly switching out rigs and presentations. We are also finding that each new spring seems to have its own hot combination; so we also carry a variety of options and work through them. Over the years we have found that there is a yearly variation on what works best day in day out as well as a more subtle variation in regard to what works best from trip to trip. If something isn't working we switch out in different but coordinated ways, until one of us clicks.

You are not alone in having trouble catching crappies around here. It has not been a "normal" spring and it is not only the crappies that are not acting normally either. This spring our numbers per outing are also way off, but we have lucked into a pattern of taking larger fish and a surprisingly large number and variety of bonus quality gamefish in the process, although due to the longer, milder pre-spawn our total numbers are pretty much up to previous years' totals. It is a bit more than luck though, we have worked pretty hard to find that niche.

BTW when I say we move around, that may be car trips between three or four spots in a three hour evening outing. We still have more trips this spring with few to no crappies than I like, but the unexpected presence of a large number of respectable bonus game fish has more than compensated. On the ultralights we use, they have provided "some" compensation for the fewer than normal crappies we expected to find. Everything we catch goes back and we aren't fishing for them either; so we will take what we can get.

The bottom line for us is that we are targeting crappies, definitely, targeting crappies, but we will accept whatever else happens along to crash the party. More and more we are finding that targeting crappies produces a definite number of very impressive sized other fish. We will gladly take that, right along with the inevitable true dinks that also show up on nearly every outing.

You just never know what will pick up the little plastics next. This spring underscores that in spades!

BTW, My partner and I have been on dozens of openwater outings from various shorelines this calendar year already. At 3 to 6 manhours per outing and some times more that totals well over 100 manhours of fishing between us just in 2012, probably closer to 200, over something like a dozen distinct locations that require car trips between them. It takes time on the water, especially when the fishing is tough. It has certainly helped that we do a pile of team fishing, and talk things over quite a bit in the process.

If we still weren't catching after that much time devoted and that many known locations sampled, we wouldn't be worth a tinker's dam as fishermen now would we!