When crappie go deep during cold temperature extremes to find suitable water conditions, they can be scattered and hard to find. On small lakes like Maynor Creek, as well as big reservoirs, crappie will hold in the deepest water areas of the lake.
According to B’n’M crappie pro Brad Whitehead, this can give smaller lake anglers an advantage by having less water to search.
“I don’t believe that all the crappie in an area stack up in the same depth in deep water,” he said. “Some of them will hug the bottom and be almost down in the mud while others will relate to structure or cover right off the bottom, and then other fish may be suspended over cover but on up in the water column.”
In their face
Fish behavior is certainly not a reason anglers struggle with catching numbers of fish in deeper and colder water. Fortunately, crappie maintain a higher metabolism than most other game fish species, which means that if you can locate them and put something down there that gets their attention, they will eat it and you can catch them.
“This time of year, I’ll go to a deep vertical presentation,” said Whitehead. “There’s two things I can accomplish by getting a lot of baits down deep and vertically trolling for crappie. One, I’m watching my graph while I troll and I can pick out a pattern of where the fish are most likely to be located, even if they are scattered over one particular area.
“Two, I can put a bait right in their face.”
Whitehead relates his presentation to a fly trying to land on your nose.
“That fly is buzzing around right in your face and it doesn’t matter how cold or how tired or how bad you feel, you’re going to try to slap that fly,” he said. “That’s the same thing I do to crappie, I put a jig right on his nose and sooner or later he’s going to smack it.”
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