Thanks to Crappie.com ...
I ate fish tonight:) I joined crappie so I could use the advance search function to research small fish and shore fishing. I have been catching crappies under the legal size ( 9 inches) with small crappie tubes. One of the threads suggested using 2 1/2" tubes for larger fish. I could not find any tubes that size, but did buy some 1/8 oz black chartreuse crappie road runners. There was a thread on road runners that was very informative and the reason I purchased them. They produced 3 nice crappies that was a good meal for the wife and me!
I grew-up in northern Minnesota and we would fish crappies through the ice with minnows. I fished only once in awhile on vacations for nearly 50 years. A couple of winters ago, we moved our snowbird location from near the Gulf Coast to the middle of Florida. I started catching bass up to five pounds off the shoreline and docks ... I was hooked on fishing again. Last winter, on a lark, I used my ulti-lite and casted some small trout lures off the dock ... caught large bluegills the size of crappies in Minnesota ... I was hooked again on fresh pan fish for supper :)
I fish Banner Marsh in Illinois ... one of the best place for Bass ... probably not saying much relative to Florida :) I knew there were nice crappies because last fall I caught several large ones on a 7/16oz Strike King Midnight Spinner ... that's a big hook! I am looking forward to trying some other suggestions I found in the forums.
