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I was reading the other day in an old magazine about types of homemade crappie beds. One guy used old 5 gallon buckets and nailed ax handles then filled the bucket part way with cement. I liked this idea and was thinking of using it myself. I'm curious as to what others have had success with?
I will be making some stake beds this year for the first time. I plan on doing some with pallets and scrap wood, others with a milk jug base, soem cement, and some pieces of PVC pipe.
Some of the crappie guides down on KY lake take 5 gallon plastic buckets and load them up with gravel from the shoreline of the lake. Then they lower the buckets full of gravel down to the lake bottom in select spots. Those buckets sit on the lake bottom and grow algae on them. The crapie think they are stumps.
If your lake is lacking in wood cover and barren then this setup may work well.
If not then stick some 2 by 2 about 4ft long inside the buckets and add some Quickcrete to the bucket and put about 10 of those out in one spot. Put ten buckets in a few more spots and you have yourself some crappie honey holes.
Picking the spot to put them on the lake is the hard part. Nice spots are points and the inside bends of an old creek channel dropoff.
Thanks for the ideas moose, they are appreciated!
heres one way that covers more area than Bill Dance's crappie porcupines condos
I have had a lot of experience putting out crappie structure. We have different methods we use, one is cutting a 5 gallon bucket in half, filling it with concrete, and sticking very short peices of pvc pipe in the concrete at angles coming out of the bucket. put couplings on top of the short peices of pvc pipe , then pre-cut your pvc pipe for the couplings to varying lengths. This way when you get to the lake you are not fighting all kinds of materials sticking up everywhere.
When you get to the area you want to put the "pvc buckets", add the pre-cut lenghts of pipe to the couplings and put them out. Another tip is to put a eyelete down in the center of the concrete, that way you can use a small rope to position the buckets.
Another important thing we found out is that wood seems to draw crappie much better than pvc. So a suggestion is to put a peice of brush out with these buckets for the most success.
Hope this helps!