Log Fishing for Crappie Part 2

A True Crappie Fishing Adventure...Day 2

In the pale-grey light of Saturday's dawn, we launched a boat at Turkey Creek Landing on the southern shore. Then we headed east up the winding snag-marked channel of the Skuna River towards the farmlands three miles up the reservoir. At that point, the lake blends into steep, wooded hills.

Clifford turned out of the river bed and killed the motor at the edge of a last year's corn patch covered with about two feet of water. During the previous season, Clifford had found crappie spawning by the jillion in such shallow water.

Clifford doused a flouncing shiner beside a cornstalk before the boat stopped gliding. I snapped a small spinner and white bucktail to a light spinning out-fit and began plying it slowly between two rows of stalks. A half-pound fish smacked the lure on my second retrieve. I caught and released three more small crappies...though there's no size limit on them...before Clifford abandoned his cane pole and live bait for a rig like mine "If you fry that size crappie real crisp and brown, you'll find they're delicious" he laughed, subtly low-rating my catch.

We pulled on boots to fish a wider area of the field without moving the boat and distrubing the shallow water. I waded from the cornfield into a cow pasture and finally caught another crappie in some honeysuckle vines. Then Clifford called me in. He's not a fisherman to waste much time on crisp- and- browns.

"This water is too shallow he told me, big crappie are afraid of it" "Might be a good idea to fish beside some deep banks." I remarked, reminding him of a stratagem he'd taught me several years before. He'd convinced me that in the absense of suitable shallows, crappies will deposit their eggs on steep banks near the surface where the sun can hatch them.

Clifford anchored the boat over an old asphalt highway, and we fished the abruptly sloping shoulders on each side. He went back to his cane-pole and redfin shinners and wrestled out two big slabs while I was setting up a jigging rig. I'd heard several artificial bait anglers brag they could catch crappies on jigs anywhere and anytime they could be taken with live bait.

I'm a jig fisherman myself, fully appreciative of the great versatility of the simple nylon and lead lure., but I wouldn't bet a dime that any angler on earth could catch as many crappies on jigs as Clifford can on redfins.

Though proficient in the use of artificials, he usually favors the real thing in all his crappie-catching tactics. If I spawned and sold half a million shiners a year as Clifford does, I wouldn't have a jig in my bait box.

My jigging rig consisted of a bushy white jig, a wooded bead, a rubber band, and a sliding cork. I threaded my spinning line through the bead and the cork and tie on the jig. The rubber band I knotted tightly around the line three feet above the jig to establish that depth of fishing.

I reeled the apparatus to the tip of the rod and cast it down the highway shoulder. The bead and cork floated up, caught on the band, and held the jig at the predetermined depth.

I twitched the rod tip and began to crank the jig in slowly. a one pound crappie lowered the cork on the second twitch, and that was the extent of our luck over the highway.

We ran back to the hills and worked the steep slopes, tried weed patches, and prowled a switch-willow flat. We fished hard and were rewarded with three medium-sized crappies and a large Kentucky bass.

"I'm not ready to throw in the towel yet" Clifford told me, mopping, perspiration. "What say we try a little log-fishing before lunch?" He pulled the motor, and we took off for the graveyard of drowned trees as I described at the outset.

While Clifford was storing our two big crappies in the ice-chest, I asked him what business crappies had in 20 feet of water during the spawning season. "How far did your jig settle before the slab hit it" he asked. "About two feet" I replied. "Then the crappies aren't in 20 feet of water," he said 'They're in two feet... the top two, and that's the depth you want to fish.

They're attaching their eggs to the vegetation on the logs. Since the lake is falling so fast, they're instinctively afraid the waters will drain out of the shallows before their eggs hatch. They know these logs will float until they decompose and that the eggs will have plenty of time to incubate in the warm surface water.

"Ready for that sandwich, now?" he kidded. He's heard my proposal for lunch afterall. "Later," I answered, "Right now, a crappie is trying to take away my rod and reel."

The fish, smaller than the first two but similar in coloring, was as black as the ace of spades. "These must be specks," I observed, using a term for black crappies. "No, they're the white ones," Clifford said. They've taken on the dark coloring of the logs for camouflage. Some that have just moved into the woods will be white as snow. However, there are spects in this reservoir.

If we catch one and you compare the two species, you'll see that the black crappie has one or two more fins on it's dorsal fin...normally a total of seven or eight. It's also a little more greenish and golden, and it's mouth is much more slanted. Both kinds grow to about the same size.

WIthout another strike, "Might as well look for another log," Clifford said. He plowed the boat through undergrowth and around stumps and limbs as if our craft was an amphibious tank. Finally we came to a promising log. Clifford cut the motor and rammed the trunk head-on, jarring the water on both sides.

"Take it easy when you come up to a log," I growled, back-paddling furiously to check the momentum of the boat, "or you'll flush every crappie within 20 foot." "Then they'll be right back," he said confidently. They won't desert their nests for long."

"Jiggle your bait up and down" Clifford said. "It helps attract attention." An artificial bait fancier to the core, I added a No.2 spinner with a safety-pin snap to the rig. The snap would make it easy to change broken or damaged hooks, and the spinner blade would accend the action and flash of a silver-scaled shiner.

Appropriately tooled, I fished in the most difficult places and caught almost as many crappies as my companion. I dropped a squirming minnow between two mossy logs, and the red and white bobber disappeared with a hollow slop, like a stopper plucked from a jig. I set the hook gently, so as not to tear it from the crappies tender mouth. Until I glimpsed the monstrous saddle blanket. I thought I had tied into a big largemouth bass the way the fish was lunging and boring beneath the log pile. Anybody that says a crappie isn't game just simply never caught a big one during spawning season.

The crappie pulled the scales to three pounds four ounces. It is now mounted and hanging on the wall of my den. "That makes our quota for the day," said Clifford. "Ready to go home?" "No, but I don't want to be arrested for being a fish hog," I replied as I reeled in my line.

The End