schooling attack crappie!!!

Okay, I was prefishing and fished, the CDC Oklahoma Lake Wister tourney. The crappie were suspended at 12 foot, but noticed a few on my graph at the 6-8 foot range, just here and there. During prefishing I would raise one poles baits to around 7 foot and did catch one small fish that morning. later Friday afternoon I caught a 2 lber on a 13 foot deep flat next to the channel. she hit the top jig (using a double jig setup). So I found deeper water 16 foot and seen some fish running from 6-8 foot stacked. the second school that appeared I was ready( had brought baits up to about 7 foot. and bam, that 1.3 lber hit like a 5 lb bass. during the tourney we ran across several schools like this and talk about a thump. one about got away with a rod and it really reminded me of schooling bass chasing shad in the summertime. Wister Slab Daddy, deerhunterodie and myself had seen the same thing except they were holding tight to wood but stacked up like this, where the rest were holding at 12 feet down at CC at Hugo lake. can someone give me a little info as to why or if you have seen the same thing before. did finish 2nd in the tourney with 7 fish @ 9.25. big fish 1.90.

Thanks

TT

I like it when they slam a jig aggressively.

I see them school like that a lot after the spawn. I think they are feeding very aggressive because they are stressed for the spawn and they need to eat a lot to recover. I'm sure that they do this other times to but that's when I see this on my lake. Also seems like they will hit bigger baits during this time.

Many years ago, a buddy & I had given up on crappie fishing since the spawn had pretty much gone out. We had switched to catching bass. Back then, we figured the crappie had all moved back to deep water. We were fishing back in the bushes and saw a guy anchored out in the middle of a flat with about 7 or 8 rod & reels rigged with floats a minnows surrounding the boat.

The lake was glass smooth and I told my buddy, "hey look at that guy over there trying to catch a crappie. Doesn't he know they've all gone deep?" Surprisingly we caught a couple of crappie in the bushes while bass fishing. I figured those crappie didn't know what they were doing either.

To make a long story short, we got off the lake around 11:00 and I noticed the guy we had seen crappie fishing earlier was loading his boat too. After a few minutes, I went over and asked him how he had done. To my surprise, he had one of the best strings of good crappie I had seen all spring.

He said, he would sit there watching his floats and every 20-30 minutes, a few of his floats would go down at the same time as a big school swam through. Once again, I found out, I didn't know nearly as much as I thought I did.