Crappie newbie needs help

I am new to crappie fishing and this is my first post here. I am trying to figure out what the crappie are doing on a lake I fish and I need help. This forum seems to have lots of good info.
This summer I started crappie fishing on a small lake (under100 acres) in southern Michigan. Following the advice of a friend, I tied a small jig on 9 foot WM rod and a 12 foot Cabalas rod. Tipped the jigs with a minnow and trolled slowly around using my electric motor. After a few times I realized the crappie were holding in weeds on two shelves about 8-10 foot deep and along a couple of drops offs. (I have sonar). If I could feel the weeds, I would catch crappie.
I refined my presentation to using 4 lb Berkley improved Vanish line and seemed to catch more fish. I started trolling in small circles, putting both rods on the inside turn, making the jig go very slow. Finally I narrowed my jigs down to Northland Fire-Fly jigs – Bumblebee and Sunrise patterns. I also began to notice I was catching almost all my fish on whichever rod I was holding – suggesting to me I was missing many hits on the rod in the rod holder. I finally got to the point where I was limiting out on nice fish (for MI).
Now that the cold weather has hit and the weeds are almost gone, I am having a hard time catching many fish. I will get a couple here and there, sometimes in places I didn’t get any this summer. I can’t seem to figure out where they are holding.
The lake is about 30 feet deep and full of minnows. I know the crappie are still there somewhere. Are they deep?
Can anyone offer some advice as to where they might be and how to catch them?
Oh, I forgot - if they are in deep water, how do I fish for them?
I have never had as much fun as I do catching crappie – love it! Makes me wish I lived farther south.
jcass

How clear is the water in your lake? If it's clear the fish may hold deeper than in a murkey water lake. Small lakes are much easier to figure out if you fish them over a period of time.

I found that when the weeds die off in the fall and at the start of winter that the fish will suspend out over deeper water. But they may not hang out on the bottom unless the lake is frozen. I found them in 10ft to 15ft depths below the surface over 35ft of water depth. They often suspend not very far from those places where you caught them before. Then they can move horizontally back to the shelf to feed and then move horizontally back out over open water to suspend again. Those movements are not very long and they may be within 100 yards of where you caught them all summer. During the winter months the fish are much easier to catch if you can locate them. They may bit soft but they still have to eat and the fact that they school up in huge schools together means that once you find them you should be able to fish for them all winter long. Once they get into their winter staging areas they will stay there for several months or until ice out. You catch them by getting your bait at the right depth. If they are at 10ft below the surface then your bait needs to be at 10ft and not at 11 ft. fish above them a little maybe but not below them. They won't go down to get a bait from what I have heard. Slow speeds are just hanging a jig right in front of them is the key. Troll no faster than .05mph I set my Minn-kota on the lowest setting possible and then use it only to keep me barely moving. On windy days you can drag a bucket or wind sock behind the boat to slow you down. Maybe use two windsocks to slow the boat down if it's really windy. I don't fish when it's really windy even when I fish small lakes. One a nice winter's day when the sun is out and it's calm you can catch a lot of suspended crappie by just hovering over them. Troll around using the depth finder to locate the schools and then throw out a marker Bouy close by. I would throw the bouy out upwind of where the fish are schooled and then fish into the wind with the trolling motor. That way the wind will blow you away from your marker bouy and you won't get tangled in it if your blown backwards by gusting wind. Use your light lines that are invisible and if they don't bite on plain old jigs try switching colors or adding some minnows to the jig. Fishing minnows alone on a #4 size hook really works too. Sometimes better than a plain old jig. And don't forget to add some Berkely Power Bait Crappie Nibbles (Chartruse) to the hook of your jigs. That can really make the crappie bite better.

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Originally Posted by jcass

I am new to crappie fishing and this is my first post here. I am trying to figure out what the crappie are doing on a lake I fish and I need help. This forum seems to have lots of good info.
This summer I started crappie fishing on a small lake (under100 acres) in southern Michigan. Following the advice of a friend, I tied a small jig on 9 foot WM rod and a 12 foot Cabalas rod. Tipped the jigs with a minnow and trolled slowly around using my electric motor. After a few times I realized the crappie were holding in weeds on two shelves about 8-10 foot deep and along a couple of drops offs. (I have sonar). If I could feel the weeds, I would catch crappie.
I refined my presentation to using 4 lb Berkley improved Vanish line and seemed to catch more fish. I started trolling in small circles, putting both rods on the inside turn, making the jig go very slow. Finally I narrowed my jigs down to Northland Fire-Fly jigs – Bumblebee and Sunrise patterns. I also began to notice I was catching almost all my fish on whichever rod I was holding – suggesting to me I was missing many hits on the rod in the rod holder. I finally got to the point where I was limiting out on nice fish (for MI).
Now that the cold weather has hit and the weeds are almost gone, I am having a hard time catching many fish. I will get a couple here and there, sometimes in places I didn’t get any this summer. I can’t seem to figure out where they are holding.
The lake is about 30 feet deep and full of minnows. I know the crappie are still there somewhere. Are they deep?
Can anyone offer some advice as to where they might be and how to catch them?
Oh, I forgot - if they are in deep water, how do I fish for them?
I have never had as much fun as I do catching crappie – love it! Makes me wish I lived farther south.
jcass

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We're in west central Ohio and once the water temps drop into the 50's, crappie fishing gets tougher than it's worth, in our opinion. But like Moose says, they tend to go deeper and they spread out once the turnover takes place.
the lake we fish the most for crappie is a murky green most of the year due to suspended alge, and they'll still go 20 feet deep sometimes. If we're determined to fish for crappie, we slow down our presentation and downsize the offering.
Last Sunday while fishing a farm pond, Doug pulled a 12 1/2 inch crappie out from under an overhanging willow tree with his 12' jigging pole. He was barely moving a tiny YUM grub tipped with a Crappie Nibble. - Roberta

THanks Moose1am and Roberta.
I did move out into deeper water (25-30ft) like you suggested and found some suspended. Still scattered - can't find any concentrations.
THanks again for your time.
jcass

what are the water temps of this lake ? (surface, 5ft, 10ft, etc). I'm thinking that they have moved away from the dying weeds, because the decaying weeds are removing a lot of the oxygen from the water (oxidation). If the water temps are relatively the same from surface to where the fish are, the lake has turned over recently, it's not deep enough to form a thermocline, or the weather has cooled the upper layers of the water column down to near the same as the lower levels ... then the Crappie WOULD be scattered. And since they can't abide by the conditions near the weed growth .... they'd likely move out to the next deepest structure, be that what it may. They won't really be in concentrated schools until the water cools down below 55deg.
Are we talking White Crappie or Black Crappie, here ? It does make a bit of difference, at times. WC's don't seem to move as far or as fast as do BC's ... when the water temps gravitate up or down. WC's like to move vertically in the water column, and stay over the submerged cover - while the BC's seem to like to move more horizontally.
Study the KY Lake Crappie Tagging & Movement Study on the KDFWR website ( http://www.kdfwr.state.ky.us/navigat...7&NavPath=C101 ) Pay no attention to the lake or the fact that it's many miles South of you ... just check out the movements of each specie, the cover and depths used, and the time of year (you may have to estimate the water temps and correlate those to the lake you fish, as the study does not give current water temps in the reports). This may give you some idea of movement patterns for either, or both, of the two species ... then you can apply that to your waters and see if it puts you where the fish are.
If the lake is <100acres .... they can't go far, just deeper. .........luck2ya ...cp :cool:

Is your lake faily clear and clean with a lot of igneous rock in that area? You being up in Michigan are in the what is called " Canadian Shield" where the last Glaciers scrapped away a lot of the fine silt and topsoil along with gravel, rubble and even huge bolders and moved them south to the middle of IN. If your lake is clear and does not have a lot of wood (Submerged trees or submerged stumps) then maybe putting in a few bush piles could help concentrate the fish. I fish a stripper pit that is only 90 acres and there are just a few places that have brush under the water. I can almost guarantee that there will be crappie in that brush every time I go out. I have been fishing this lake since last Dec and I have caught fish every time I go there. Some times I catch more than others but I have not been skunked yet. The key is knowing were the only brush piles are located. Someone or something put some submerged trees in the stripper pit and it's along a drop off. If you can find a drop off (even a place where it only changes depth by a few feet) you could place some oak tree branches or some fruit tree branches in about 20 to 25 feet of water and some in about 10 to 15 feet of water. If you lake is extreemly clear then you may want to put them deeper but it's all depends on the clarity of the water. Only you can know that. This way when the weeds die off and start to decay you will give the fish something to concentrate around. Our lakes are turning over here an I am about 300 miles south of Michigan in the southern tip of Indiana. If you pit is deep it may retain the heat longer and not turn over as fast as a shallow lake of that size. The volume of water in the lake and the amount of wind, rain and the colder air temps will cool the surface waters and make the lake turn over if there is a thermocline. The dying weeds are eaten by the bacteria in the water and they consume the dissolved oxygen in the process. So CP is right when he said to move away from the weeds for a while. But the oxygen gets into the water from it's contact with the air and the surface of the water so winds and waves and rain will put some oxygen back into the surface water. If you find a spot where there is an INFLOW into your lake I would fish there. A stream that empties into the lake can carry food along with the water and that means the fish will be there to take advantage of that food source when it's washed into the lake. The fresh flow of water into a lake from a river or stream will also increase the disolved oxygen at that spot. So will a underground spring.

Fish are starting to feed more agressively at this time of the year so if you hunt around you should be able to find them. They will hit minnows or jigs or a combination of minnows and jigs. Slow troll and I mean slow. Less than 0.5mph works best. Sometimes the crappie want the bait held perfectly still right in front of their nose before they will bite. They can be finicky as we all know but during the fall after the lakes turnover they fish will start feeding and trying to fatten up before the cold winter weather arrives.

Suspended crappie are sometimes hard to get to bite. It seems that they are in a negative or neutral mood when they suspend over cover. But when they are in the cover and on the bottom they seem to bite better. Also it's easier to get the bait in front of them as you can lower the bait down until you hit bottom and reel up a few turns and be right on the fish. But when they suspend 25ft down over 50ft of water it's hard to get the bait right at the 25 ft mark even when going slowly. I drop shot and that helps. Use a heavier lead sinker in deeper water and tie the jig or hook about 12" above the weight. That way you will have tension on the jig and can feel those soft bites better. Hold onto the rod and put a finger on the line to help detect the bite. Lift the rod Immediately when you feel a bite. Just quickly start to lift the rod tip up about a foot or two when you get a bit.

Brush piles are the key to finding the crappie. Wood is a crappie magnet.

I went to the pit today and worked on my boat trailer for about 3 hours and then took all my tools back home. I went back out fishing from 4 pm to 6pm and boated over 20 white crappie in under two hours. I even stopped to pick up a guy who was fishing along the bank and took him out fishing with me. He was not catching anything and I was only fishing 100ft from the bank and had six in the boat already. He caught a nice 12" White Crappie on a minnow. I took about 2 dozen minnows with me and let him use them. I fished with my white Squirmin Squirt jig body on the 1/16oz plain lead head jig that I picked up at Wal-Mart. We had three nice White Crappie in the boat by 6 PM and then it was starting to get dark. Most of the crappie that I catch in this pit are between 8 and 8.5" long. These White crappie were all over 10" which is a good fish for this small stripper pit lake. Now other lakes these would be small crappie. KY lake crappie have to be 10" long or you can't keep them. The crappie down at KY Lake average 1 to two pounds in size. But they have a steady supply of threadfin shad to feed upon. Our crappie have gizzard shad but they grow to big for the crappie to feed on and are not as good of a year round food source as the threadfin shad are. It's just too cold in the winter time here in Southern IN for threadfin shad to survive in most of our lakes We have some lakes that are heated by power plant water discharges and they have a good population of threadfin shad and a bigger population of larger crappie.

Good luck and hope you find those slabs. It's going to get cold soon so time is a wasting.

We had 68 deg F air temp today and overcast all day long. But the winds were calm and it was a great day to fish.

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Originally Posted by jcass

THanks Moose1am and Roberta.
I did move out into deeper water (25-30ft) like you suggested and found some suspended. Still scattered - can't find any concentrations.
THanks again for your time.
jcass

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I wonder how many keyboards Moose goes through in a year?

I use one of those ergonomic type Microsoft Keyboards. Before that I had started to develop carpel tunnel. It took about a month or two to adjust to the new keyboard style but now I can't type at all on a regular keyboard. The regular computer keyboards keys are too close together for me now. The last test I took for typing clocked me at 45 wpm or there abouts.

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Originally Posted by fatboy

I wonder how many keyboards Moose goes through in a year?

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Ok, let me know when you get up to 60 wpm. Took typing three years, even though it wasn't cool. I am not a "hunt and peck" typer, i know all the home keys.