http://www.crappienow.com/home/crapp...al-tournaments

The last couple of years I've been talking about trolling crank baits for suspended crappie using side planner boards.

Guess I'm not the only one using this technique to catch a few crappie.

These guys took a few prizes using this technique.

I learned to troll crank baits and catch crappie by accident one day at KY lake fishing with my dad. We fished KY lake twice a year from the time I was around 8 years old until around 1983. One day back in the 1960's I was moving slowly from one spot to another using the gas motor. But since we didn't have far to go I was going slow. I let the crank bait out and trolled it behind the boat while moving back to your fishing spot. I caught a nice big crappie doing this several times. Not sure why I didn't really pick up on this at the time. Probably because my late father was in control of the boat and telling me where to go and how to fish. But over the last 50 years I've learned now that I was onto something good. We could have caught a lot more crappie if we have continued to experiment with trolling crank baits. But Dad was stuck in his ways and ended up always fishing the same spots in the same old way. Now he was pretty good at catching bass and had caught many more big bass then I ever did. But he fished the lake when it was first formed in the 1940's. By the late 1960's the lake had been around for some 30 years and some of the wood was gone. By the 1980's a lot more of the original wood was rotted away.

It would have been hard to troll crank baits back in the 1940's with all the wood in the lake. You would have lost a lot of baits doing that. But today with the lake bottom relatively clear except for a few man made brush piles trolling cranks is a real option.

BTW: I just found out about www.crappienow.com and spent the last hour checking it out. It's a nice web site and I learned a few new things today.