Fishing new areas

[Bluesraider]

Ok, bare with me as this may be one of those questions that are a bit vague and wide open but I know many of you will have some good insight. My question is this....what tips do you have for fishing (for Crappie of course) a completely new area for the first few times?

There is a spot relatively close to me that I finally decided to give a try. Its just off the Mississippi river and conservation web page said it has 43 fish-able acres (although it did seem bigger to me)**Correction, just saw where it is actually about 200 acres...which makes more sense to me. The 43 acres were the other lakes around it** It is a bayou and quite deep in the middle, my finder showed about 25-30 ft most of the way down with it coming up sharply as you got closer to the banks. Lots of tops and brush along the bank as well as cypress trees.

Decided to do a variety of things like throwing out some jugs for cats and also brought some crickets for some bream fishing, but I really wanted to figure out how to possibly crappie fish it. Not sure it was the best day to try anything due to the wind being pretty strong and it was really tough for me to keep the boat still for very long. I did manage quite a few small bream around some cypress tress and caught one cat on a jug but had zero luck on the crappie. I am not setup to pull cranks and typically will spider rig with minnows but didn't have those either, so I tried trolling with some gulp minnows and a couple different Garland baby shad. I did try to drop a jig around some brush but as I said earlier the wind made it really tough to not get my boat pushed up in trees. I felt I got a full days workout on the trolling motor!!! I did notice quite a lot of little gar around the trees in the bank line, but I did manage to still catch some bream there. I know there have to be some crappie in there and I am not sure how much pressure it really gets. I have been there twice (once to just see where it was and then on Saturday to fish) and I was the only one there. Its a very pretty place to go and will always hold water due to getting fed from rises in the Mississippi River so I would really like to go there more if its worth my while.

I guess back to my main question....when you decide to try a new spot like this that you have no knowledge of, what is your game plan? What tactics do you use and how long do you stay with it until you say its not worth the trouble? It may not be a good time of the year to be trying a new spot for crappie but I want to learn how to branch out and be able to fish new spots with success. Thanks as always for your help and advice.