Do you want to catch the biggest slab crappie in any lake you fish? Then pay close attention to how successful tournament anglers consistently find the big ones wherever they go.
Consider, for example, the dominating team of Ronnie Capps and Steve Coleman. They’ve won many crappie tournaments, including six championship events. How do they always seem to find the biggest crappie, even on lakes they’ve never fished before?
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Capps and Coleman begin their quest for heavyweight crappie before they leave home. They study contour lake maps and try to figure out where crappie are likely to be at that time of year. If it’s a spring tournament, they mark potential shallow spawning areas on the map, such as stump flats and the upper reaches of creeks and rivers. They also mark deeper areas nearby, such as a creek or river channel ledge where female crappie typically gang up before and after the spawn.
Male vs. Female Crappie
Since female crappie usually run bigger than the males, Capps and Coleman normally target the females. However, they’ve learned that male crappie are often bigger when they fish tournaments in Northern states.
“The farther north you go, the more you have to concentrate on catching male fish,” Capps says. “When I fish tournaments at Illinois’ Shelbyville Lake, Indiana’s Monroe Lake and in Ohio, male crappie win most of the time.”
The last time Capps and Coleman fished a tournament at Monroe Lake, it was early in the spawning cycle and Monroe was high and muddy. On practice days prior to the tournament, Coleman looked for deeper fish by spider-rigging minnows in the team’s bass boat. Capps ventured into shallow, flooded cover with a 40-year-old Gheenoe. This wide, stable fiberglass canoe has a 9.8-hp outboard on its square transom and comfortable swivel bass-boat seats fore and aft.
The male crappie had pushed far back into Monroe’s flood water to begin the spawning ritual. Capps found them when he silently sculled the Gheenoe into a narrow ditch lined with blackberry bushes. When he dipped a 1⁄16-ounce jig dressed with a plastic tube into the bushes, he watched a huge male crappie inhale the bait only 6 inches beneath the surface. When this happened again, Capps knew he had found the winning fish.
During the tournament, both Capps and Coleman dipped jigs into the blackberry bushes from the canoe, because the water was too shallow for the bass boat. They brought in a tournament limit of 10 male crappie that weighed nearly 17 pounds, which set a new lake record.
Capps and Coleman dip 1⁄16-ounce jigs into shallow cover with a 9-foot B’n’M Capps and Coleman Wading Rod. They match the rod with 6-pound test P-Line fluorocarbon. Capps favors a B’n’M 50 spinning reel, while Coleman opts for B’n’M’s new Quick-Change Crappie Reel. When they dip a 1⁄8-ounce jig, they step up to 8-pound test.
Their homemade, unpainted jigs sport Gamakatsu hooks, and they usually dress the jigs with a Super Jig Tube from Midsouth Tackle that has a lime green body with a chartreuse glow tail. During the Monroe tournament, they fished blue and purple tubes, which they claim is deadly on male crappie. They nicknamed this color blurple.
Though male crappie generally hold in shallow cover during spring, the females stay deeper in the same area in a prespawn or post-spawn mode. The exception is during those magic days when the females move up to drop their eggs.
Capps and Coleman have their best luck with female crappie by spider-rigging jigs tipped with minnows or with their double-minnow rig along ledges and over stump flats.
However, this dynamic duo always hedges their bets. On practice days, Capps jigs shallow cover, while Coleman spider-rigs minnows in deeper water. They stay on the move and cover as much water as possible. Coleman spider-rigs with only three or four rods so he can pick up and move quickly between spots. They weigh their fish before releasing them and compare notes at the end of the day. When the tournament starts, they fish wherever the biggest crappie were found in practice.
Key Areas
Since major crappie tournaments are often held on large reservoirs, it’s impossible to scout the entire lake in a few days. Capps and Coleman generally concentrate on the most fertile water, especially when they fish somewhere they’ve never been before.
“We typically look for stained or green water,” Capps says. “That tells you the water is more fertile and that the crappie are bigger there because they have plenty to eat.”
Capps and Coleman usually find the most fertile water in the creek arms. The best fishing often happens in the first mile of the reservoir just downstream from the mouth of the feeder creek. In lakes that are stained throughout, they target the shallower, more stained sections.
“Take Reelfoot Lake, for example,” Capps says. “The northern end of Reelfoot is shallower and has more run-off than the southern end of the lake. It warms first and grows bigger crappie.”
Even after the spawn, Capps and Coleman concentrate on stained, fertile water near the spawning areas. Capps claims that crappie don’t always head for deep water after the spawn, as many fishermen believe. Crappie stay close to their forage, which they often find in stained, shallow water. On some lakes, Capps and Coleman catch crappie in the same places in July and August as they do in February and March.
“You have to fish where the big ones live,” Capps says. “And you normally have to work at it to get four or five good ones in a tournament day.”
Deep Alternative
Though noted crappie guide Todd Huckabee also dotes on shallow, fertile water in creek arms, there are times when he looks for big crappie in deep water. Huckabee guides on Oklahoma’s Lake Eufaula, and he’s a threat to win any crappie tournament he enters.
“In any lake, the bigger crappie are always going to be in the muddy water,” Huckabee says. “But on some lakes, you can catch big crappie from deep brushpiles in clear water.”
According to Huckabee, the reason deep crappie are larger is because few anglers fish for them and they live longer. Some lakes are so clear that Huckabee catches springtime crappie spawning 12 to 18 feet deep around brushpiles on ledges.
In this situation, he opts for one of two presentations. One is spider-rigging 3⁄16-ounce Crappie Pro jigs dressed with 2-inch Yum Wooly Beavertails. He occasionally tips the jigs with minnows. Quantum 11-foot Xtralite XP Todd Huckabee Pullin’ rods matched with 8-pound test Silver Thread AN40 monofilament handle Huckabee’s spider-rigging chores. The spread of rods lets him target the brushpiles and hang baits off the deep edge of the drop-off where big females may be suspended. The other option is what he calls “two-pole trolling.”
“I hold one rod over one side of the boat and fish the brush where the males usually hang out,” Huckabee says. “I hold the other rod off the deep side of the boat where I have a better chance of picking off the bigger females.”
On super-clear lakes like Lake of the Ozarks and Beaver Lake, Huckabee sometimes plucks crappie from brushpiles 40 feet deep in the summertime. He marks a brushpile with a buoy, holds his boat directly over the cover and drops his offering straight down to the crappie. Typically, he fishes a Vibra King tube on a 3⁄16-ounce jig or a Kentucky rig with a 1⁄2- to 1-ounce sinker. The Kentucky rig’s heavy sinker gets deep fast, helps him feel the cover and lets him jiggle snagged hooks free.
Internet Search
The Internet often tells Huckabee whether he should fish shallow or deep before he leaves home, especially when he’s headed to a large lake that has hosted many crappie tournaments. A web search of past tournaments on a given lake provides invaluable information. Huckabee is mainly interested in tournaments that took place at the same time of year he will be fishing there.
For example, he checks the weights of the top five finishers to get a strong indication of what size crappie the lake produces. A 1-pound crappie is a big one on some lakes, but not on Mississippi’s Grenada Lake where 2- to 3-pound crappie are common. If the biggest crappie you’re catching don’t measure up to what past tournament winners caught, you know you haven’t found the right fish.
Also, some websites feature interviews with the top finishers in the tournament, and they often reveal which sections of the lake they were fishing, how deep and what baits and techniques they were using. This kind of information puts you on the right track.
“I go to crappieusa.com, crappiemasters.net and castamerica.com,” Huckabee says. “Those are the three main tournament trails, and their tournament results go back 5 to 10 years.”
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