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Senior Member
Now those are nice slab crappie. Did you count the number of dorsal spines to see if they were black crappie or white crappie.
Sometimes the White Crappie males will appear dark colored during the spawn and will look like a black crappie. It's hard to see the vertical bars when they turn dark. But the dorsal spines of the black crappie will have 7 to 8 spines while the white crappie only have 5 or 6 dorsal (top) spines.
Originally Posted by daniel240
Member
I didnt know you could tell by couting the spines. I will do that next time. Some of them appeared much darker than the others.
Junior Member
Those are indeed pretty nice. I am still not having much luck witht he crappie right now, though yesterday afternoon I did get a few nice red ear and a couple really nice gills. I saw one crappie that was swimming at the top of the water. He had something wrong with him and there was a large white patch on his side.
Nice day for fishing though, got some sun thats for sure.
Senior Member
This time of the year the water is much warmer at the surface. It could be 73 deg F at the surface and only 50 deg F ten feet down. So they like to come up and warm themselves I guess.
I have been catching a lot of crappie right at the surface near drop off and over the top of brush. The brush can be in 20 ft of water but the crappie will station over the top of the brush and suspend there. They come to the surface where the waters warmer and they can get energized by the warmer water. Remember that they are cold blooded and take on the temperature of the surrounding water. As they warm up they can swim much faster. They are really slowed down when the water is near freezing.
I actually got sunburned the other day when I was out fishing. It got up to the high 70's and there were few clouds in the sky. I was thinking it was going to rain these past few days so I wanted to work on my garden area and then go fishing after I get the garden planted. But it's been nice and sunny and warm these past three days. I could have gone camping up at Patoka Lake. It would have been great camping weather.
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