One of the great things about being a crappie angler is that you can learn your trade at any number of lakes across the country. Seasonal crappie fishing patterns remain pretty similar in a variety of places and typically work interchangeably across wide geographic areas.
What this means in laymen’s terms is that if you learn how to crappie fish on one lake, these tactics will put you in the ballgame on another.
Knowing where to fish for crappie is usually a bigger challenge than how to fish for them. Because fishing is a big tourism attraction, state natural resource agencies as well as local tourism divisions try to assist anglers find fish by placing fish attractors in most fishing waters.
To the seasoned angler, these fishing attractors are too frequently dismissed as amateur grounds. Because the locations of the attractors are public knowledge, it’s assumed they get fished out.
B’n’M pro staffer and national Crappie Masters Champion Mike Parrott warns anglers at all skill levels not to overlook public fish attractors. As fisheries managers seek to build fish habitat that doesn’t constantly have to be maintained from year to year, the locations, composition, and fish-producing abilities of today’s artificial reefs are better than ever.
“Vertical structure that comes up high off the bottom is always good,” Parrott said. “If it’s not in real deep water, it provides shade to fish and they’re going to get on the shady side of it or the down current side of it.
“They can change up and down as far as the depth on something’s that sticking way up off the bottom. They can go to the bottom or they can suspend up or suspend above it a lot of times or out to the sides of it.”
Parrott said that artificial structure also works well in current areas, providing relief from current for crappie to ambush prey.
“They may want to get out of the current a little bit so they get behind it on the down current side or on the shady side if the sun gets some penetration in the water,” he said.
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