Crappie fishing question

[manbearfish]

If it was real windy what would you use to fish for Crappie? I use a 3/16oz. Head but depending on the wind I may go heavier. Is that wrong to do?

[bob46]

My thoughts are that a little heavier won't hurt I think the wind blowing on the line will slow the fall down crappie pappy hopefully will chime in he is a crappie expert

[crappiepappy]

I wouldn't consider using a heavier jighead as "wrong to do". Many never use anything lighter than a 1/8oz. The problem with a heavier jig is, even though it casts better in the wind, it falls faster in the water ... and that might be too fast, or not stay in the strike zone long enough.

Personally, I'd probably try to find a less windy area to fish, but if that wasn't possible or that spot wasn't productive ... I might consider another method besides casting. Longline trolling or Pushing the jigs, maybe.

[smashdn]

Hair jig under a bobber. Let the waves give it action, bobber adds weight for casting purposes without interfering with jog action. Can hold it in the right spot easier.

[Bent Loomis]

I agree with Pappy. Crappie like to hit on the fall and I'd say you be missing out on a few bites in a days fishing by going to heavy because of the sink rate. That could be the next 3lb + crappie you catch. You know my go to method, jig, bob, jig. To much wave action and I don't do as well. A ripple is fine but to much herky jerky and I do better casting. I don't go heavier mainly because when you go up in weight, the hooks are usually bigger which means a bigger bait. I Ive had my most success on inch and a half or 2" stuff. Wind is tough to deal with at times even when I can hold the boat on the spot with the trolling motor. Only my opinion and what works for me. Good luck and tear em up !

[RADRJP]

get you a Rapala jigging rap and find fish on your finder and do some vertical jigging. I have been successful with this on many a windy day.
Tight lines.

[Moveon]

There are several things that I do when it's windy. First I try to get out of the wind and find a leeward area out of the wind. I have to do this because my boat is not designed to fish in big waves or high winds. It's only 15'11" long and has a narrow beam and the front of the boat is john boat shaped with no deep "V" to cut into the waves. So if I hit a big wave with the front of my boat at a 90 Deg. Angle to the wave then I get WET big time. Water will splash up over the front of the boat and soak me in no time. I have to cut into the waves at a 45 deg angle and I still have to go slow. And I still get wet. So with my boat it's a lot different. Now I'm talking about winds over 15 mph to 20 mph which no one IMHO should be out fishing in. LOL

Now if the winds are under 15 mph say around 10 mph I might be able to handle them. In that case I might jig fish vertically in the deeper waters and then I might use a heavier jig head to keep the line tight where I can fell the bite.

The problem is this time of the year all the new bait fish are little (tiny). The insects life is starting to come back alive and becoming more active. Zooplankton is starting to grow more with the warming waters and life in general is picking up. The crappie are in the pre spawn mode and they are following the old creek channels out of the main lake into the bays as April gets here and the surface and thus shallows warm up into the mid to upper fifties deg F's.

So smaller presentations may help entice the fish to bite. They may look more natural at this time of the year. That's one theory that I learned from the Crappie Fishing Pro's at the University of Indiana Feb Crappie Fishing University Class that I took recently. Go small if it's calm and larger if it's windy. So in this case it's windy so I will go larger in size and heavier in weight in order to keep a "BOW" out of my drop shot line. I will use the trolling motor to head INTO THEWIND. I'll approach my spot from downwind and if I get into a problem the wind will blow me back away from the fishing spot instead of into the spot. I'll do what I need to do in order to get back to fishing and then head back into the wind and back up to my spot. I mark my spots with marker buoys or a GPS waypoint on my Humminbird 898C SI unit. I like using the flat "H" shaped bouys and just purchased two more of them last night from Walmart. I was surprise to see them on sale there. I fill them with expanding foam to help prevent water from leaking into them when the seams get cracked or start leaking over the years. The stay in the spot as they have to FLIP OVER in order for the lead weight to pull more line off the middle part of the "H". I've been using them for years now with great success.

Now another way to handle the wind is with Drift Socks or by dragging Chains on a rope behind the boat. These methods will help slow your drift down. The dragging chains method has some opponets though. Mostly those that put out brush piles I the lakes that they fish. They feel that the chains can destroy or mess up their brush piles. So give that some thought. But a long rope tied to the boat and with a chain on the end can help slow your boat's drift down where you can fish slower.

When the water is cold the fish are not moving as fast and may prefer a slower presentation. I do know that crappie like a bait with some movement at times. In the hot summer months I'll fish crank baits in 18 ft deep water going 1.5 to 2.5 mph and the crappie, bass and bluegills have no problem catching the crank baits. I catch lots of fish this way if the lake it not too crowded with other boats. It's my go to method in the hot summer months of July and August. Days when every one else went back home before 10:30 am due to the excessive heat and humidity. I'm not a morning person and love the 2nd shift when I worked at nights. You won't find me up at 3 am going fishing too often. I use to do that when I was very young as my father would get me up to go fishing early in the morning for Largemouth bass. But I found out how to catch fish in the middle of the day. They suspend and go deeper as the sun gets higher in the sky and can still be caught. I have a secrete way to entice them to bite which I read about in a old Herter's Guide Book that my father had in his hunting and fishing books library. That trick was used in the 1930 40's and it still works today. If you have followed my posts over the years you know what I'm talking about. A trailer jig on a 6 lb. test mono tied to the back treble hook of the crank bait. I tried to tell Russ Baily about this but he just shook his head and walked off. He's not a believer ... yet. But I bet if he saw me catching fish he would change his mind quickly. It was some thing that I knew about but never really tried until the summer of 2013 when I got the trolling plate for my motor which allowed me to really slow the boat down even when I was at idle speed. Now if I troll I troll into the wind. I do that for better boat control as I'm trolling along the drops and they can swing in and out from the bank so I have to make instant course direction changes in order to keep the baits out over the deeper water and not into the shallows were the weeds will foul the hooks on the crank baits. That's a pain in the ASS when that happens.


Now the other way to fish in the wind is with a float. There are all kinds of different floats that can be used. The long thin type are suppose to work in the winds and they don't move as fast. There thin profile that sticks up above the water is suppose to catch less wind and thus not move as fast in the wind. I don't like them myself. I have a few but don't really use them much. Maybe I'm missing out. What I do like is the little Foam slip floats that also have a plastic peg to fix the depth. They are light and don't spook the fish when they take the jig or minnow under the float. Fish will not feel any or hardly any resistance when they grab a bait under one of these 1" or 1.25 or 1.5" foam floats. The can be used in shallow waters or as deep as 8 to 10 ft feet effectively with a 1/16 oz lead head jig and tube bait 1.5" long. I like the #18 White Lighting Squirmin Squirt Baits from Bass Pro Shops. These baits have won Crappie USA fishing Tournaments on Patoka Lake two years in a row. Frank Ison and Brian Lethbridge fished Patoka lake using these baits and won a bass boat. The fished the armature division one spring and won it. Then they were forced into the semi pro division the next spring and they won that one too. I was there at the weigh in and saw them. I met Frank up in Dumpling Creek back in April 2nd of 2003/4 when the water was way down that year. I think that the lake was at 532 or so. I could see the tops of the trees that were flooded in that area when the lake filled up. You don't often get to see the peninsula that juts out from the North/East Shoreline at the Mouth of Dumplin Creek. That the side opposite where the creek runs back into the bay. The trees in this area at this time of the year can hold some big crappie. I caught a 1.5 lb crappie there that day. I saw Frank return at least 10 fish back to the water alive. They were all over 1 lb in size and some were around 2.0 lbs. I'd estimated. I was about 20 ft away when Frank picked up the fish out of his livewell and put them back into the lake. One at a time. He found the fish before the tournament started and when they fished the tournament the big crappie were still there. I had not fished up that far in the old Patoka River before and never has used walls launch ramp. I had always gone into that area form the main lake and it's a long long slow ride up to Walls from there. So if you go launch from Walls or even Kings Bridge area. The fishing Hot Spots Maps told me about the fishing up in Dumplin so it's not secrete. Best time to go is during the week days. The weekends can be too crowded in the spring months. But there are other areas that produce good fish too. Patoka has three or four good feeder creeks that feed into the lake in different parts of the lake. South Lick and Painter Creek are two that come to mind.

Now with the little Comal two colored slip floats 1.5" foam type I use a 1/16 Oz lead head jig so that the float is half under the water and half above the water. The two colors help to better detect bites. And then I will use a red bead and a thrill type bobber stop to set the depth of the jig. Add some Johnson Scales Scent to the inside of the Tube Baits or some dried out Berkley Crappie Nibbles in Chartreuse color. Those with the sparkle in the crappie nibbles work too. Any thing that helps make the baits look real and smell better. Wash your hands with Ivory Soap and or wear gloves when gassing up the vehicle so as not to get that nasty gasoline spell on your hands and fingers. Fish devote a very large part of their brain to SMELL. If you look at the science books on fish's brains you can see this easily. A shark can detect a few parts per million of blood in the water from many yards away . And then the fish have lateral lines along their sides which are like Sonar Arrays on a submarine. They can hear and detect the direction that the sounds are coming from. This is how fish find their food and it's a big part of what their brains are designed to do. So always remember to control the scent and sounds coming from your boats. I think that about covers it.

Oh. If you have a lot of money you can can buy a automatic down rigger setup that links to your fish finder and will automatically keep the baits at the right depth as you troll along. That would be fun to do but I don't have the funding right now to buy one. They sell for around $1,500 or so just for the cannon downrigger that I looked at on the web the other day.

I'm looking at the new Humminbird Sonix Unit like every else is. But they are $3,500 just for the 15" screen unit. I'd have to add the directional heading compass to the GPS thing and get the external Antenna to make my way points and transducer match up more accurately. I keep them right next to each other in my boat with my current Humminbird Setup. I hope that the Screens on the Sonix help me see the fish better in real times. I can see the fish on the screen when I take videos and play them back in the house under low light conditions on the bigger computer screen. But when I'm out fishing the screen is very hard for me to see on the 898C SI. I need a brighter screen and a larger screen with more pixels and better resolution in order to see the fish on SI screen and the shadows of the fish to help me figure out if there are fish in the area and if they are on the bottom of suspended up in the water column.

I started fishing with those big plastic red/white hook on the line type bobbers and a KY Lake Crappie Rig. The Coleman and Chaps Crappie rid is a dead ringer to that KY lake Crappie Rig that I use to use when I was 8 years old fishing in the buck brush of Cypress Bay when the lake was up a bit in the spring of the year. April and May back in the 1960's. We also fished these same rigs in the deeper waters along the secondary bays or coves near where the old TN river swung into the area. Those area were 15 to 20 ft deep right next to a creek channel that ran near a steep bank dropoff area. We caught lots of nice crappie fishing off the bottom with bait casting reels and rods and by lowering the rig down to the bottom and cracking up two turns on the reel. With two minnows on the line we often would catch two crappie at the same time. And before that we used 10 ft long cane poles with the thick lines tied to the pole and a single hook with a minnow and a weight on the line. We would dip the long poles deep into the buck brush and pull fish out of 1 to 2 ft of water along the roots of the buck brush. Years later the Buck Brush all vanished. But I found that way back in the very back end of the bay there was still lots of buch brush and saw guys catching big crappie by casting jigs out to them in very shallow water. Water less than 3 to 4 ft deep in the very back end of the bays. I can't remember the time of the year but I'd bet it was mid April on KY lake.

[Bassky]

I just vertical jig over the cover in windy conditions. Or try to find a less windy cove. I do not change jig sizes unless the crappie dictate a quicker drop.

[Moveon]

just lower the bait down slowly by lowering the rod down or reel slowly backwards with a bait casting rod to control the rate of decent of the jigs. Crappie and most fish like to hit baits as they flutter down into the depths. Like a minnow that's been stunned and is just floating down into the depths. I fish with live bait a lot instead of jigs. But you can do the same thing with a jig or a live bait. Bee Moths, Crickets or minnows can be lowered down slowly to entice the fish to bit when you get to the right depth. Just mark you line right in front of the reel with a magic marker to get back to the same depth every time.

I just vertical jig over the cover in windy conditions. Or try to find a less windy cove. I do not change jig sizes unless the crappie dictate a quicker drop.

[crappiepappy]

Almost forgot ... you can always use this method I call Vertical Casting, as long as you can maintain your position in windy conditions

http://www.fishin.com/forums2/conten...y-crappiepappy

[Moveon]

I use to cast and retrieve 1/16 oz to 1/8 oz. Marabou hair jigs for crappie at Patoka Lake when it was first opened. The Black crappie in the shallow weedy areas loved them.

Hair jig under a bobber. Let the waves give it action, bobber adds weight for casting purposes without interfering with jog action. Can hold it in the right spot easier.