It Aint Over Until The Fat ............

[Jerry Blake]

Crappie run out of eggs and the water gets too warm.

A lot of crappie fisherman think crappie spawn in a week or two and it's all over but that aint necessarily so, at least not on Lake Greeson. I think as long as crappie still have viable eggs and they can find water that is the right temperature they keep spawning over and over. As the water warms they move deeper to find the temperatures they need but they also need some light penetration so the water needs to be fairly clear as well.

With this theory in mind and surface temps back down to 70-degrees this morning - thanks to a major cold front with cold rain that came through over the weekend - I figured we should check out a few known spawning areas to see what we could find.

We didn't find very many but this pair came out of about 7-feet of water in a pine tree lay-down and hit minnows fished about 5-feet deep:

They both came out of the same spot on the tree and I suspect they were spawning. The male still had his full "Tuxedo" on and his tail was raw from fanning his bed. The female still had a few very viable looking eggs. We caught several other white crappie on other parts of the same tree and they all appeared to still be in spawning mode.

The female was 17.25-inches and probably was at or close to 3-pounds back in March before she started spawning but today she was only 2-pounds. I didn't measure or weigh the male but it was probably about 16-inches long and probably weighed just over 1.5-pounds.

The biggest stressor on our crappie this year has been water temperature and the white crappie seem to have suffered the most. Black crappie seem to start spawning at slightly cooler water temperatures than white crappie. For the longest time this spring the water was just a bit too cool for the white crappie to spawn, no matter where they looked, but the black crappie were getting it done.

Then within a week the water temps jumped 10-degrees and the white crappie then had to start looking for cool enough water to spawn in. By then the black crappie were nearly spawned out and they moved into a post-spawn pattern pretty quickly while the white crappie kept on searching for places with adequate spawning conditions. It's been pretty tough on them and they're really starting to get thin compared to what they were two months ago.

Anyway, after checking a couple other shallow spots and getting hung up a zillion times I decided it might be more productive to move a bit deeper and fish for post-spawn black crappie and we ended up with this mess.

We released another 50 or so that were under 10-inches (most just barely) so we'll have some to catch when the have some meat on their bones.

We usually think of cold fronts as a negative occurrence but this time of year they can give us a few more chances to do a little Combat Crappie Fishing (relatively) shallow and possibly give a few crappie one more chance to put a few more offspring in the lake.

[skiptomylu]

I do think they spawn over a couple months and not all of them at one time. I also believe each female will go in and out several times and not put all her eggs in one nest. I feel that on a normal year here they can start in late Feb and not stop for a good while.

Our fish this year I believe spawned out in 9'-10' of water for most of them. Conditions from cold and the Sabine River Authority's lake level dropping at the worst time made for a very strange year on T- Bend.

[Kyle Schoenherr]

Nice job Jerry, and i agree about the spawn. I have been catching black crappie spawning since late February when the water was only 51 degrees and we are still at it as of today. I am definately a beleiver of a longer spawn. I think if every crappie came into spawn at the same time you could probably walk across them.

[Fatman]

Jerry

Nice mess of fish!!!! Gotta agree with you, with everything I've read all fish don't spawn at the same time in a body of water.

Fatman