Nothing like being “spot on” on the spawn

Peak crappie experience is like none other on the planet

Ron Garavelli and I had 10 crappie from two hours on our first fishing spot at Barnett Reservoir Tuesday (April 16), a mix of dark black males and fat female chunks.

It wasn’t the bite we had expected, not after he and another partner had spanked them pretty good late the preceding afternoon.

“Don’t know how to explain it,” said Garavelli, the chief of fisheries for the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks. “They were doing it Monday and hit it every time we put a jig in that cut grass.”

He suggested that it was probably the wind, which was expected and strong out of the southeast. When it started blowing, our little exposed area shut off. The bite stopped.

We headed out of the open cove and looked for sheltered water, which we found as soon as we rounded an island on the Rankin County shoreline about three miles south of Mississippi Highway 43. Seems like every boat on the lake was looking for that same calm water; there were 15 packed in this one corner of the backwater area.

On our idle in toward the crowd, we watched to see if anybody was catching fish. We saw one or two being landed.

“Looks slow, but we can try it,” I told Garavelli. “Beats fighting the wind.”

We pulled in among the crowd, dropped the Power Pole and put our jigs in the water.

Then magic happened.

All of a sudden, every boat in that little corner started pulling in fish, one right after another. Seemed there was a bowed-up jig pole on every boat, along with a lot of whooping and yelling.

“Got one,” I hollered at Garavelli, right after feeling a solid thump on my chartreuse and white jig. It traveled up the 6-pound braided line and through the B&M Buck’s Jig Pole with a whack.

“So do I,” my partner hollered back.

Ten minutes and 10 fish later, we knew we were in for a treat.

“You know how you always hear about being there when somebody flips the switch and the peak of the crappie spawn starts, and every fish in a certain part of the lake goes to one area,” Garavelli said. “I believe that is what’s happening right now. It is on.”

It was the second time in my life to be on the water, at the precise moment and place, when the crappie spawn turned on full bore. The first was several years ago in the stumps on Barnett, and a friend and I caught our limit of 60 in an hour, clipped our barbs and caught and released another 100 or so.

But even with those numbers, it was nothing like what I witnessed Tuesday. Few others in the crowd had enjoyed that kind of action before.

“You know in all the years that I have fished, and most of that was spent tournament bass fishing and going to the Louisiana marshes for speckled trout, I have never seen anything like that,” said Joe Alford of Brandon. “I had four fish when I pulled in there and left with the limit about an hour later. I never moved my boat more than 10 feet and all I used was a jig, but every time I put it in the water, one would slam it.”

Charles Lindsay of Pelahatchie, the current points leader with one tournament left on the Magnolia Crappie Club regular season schedule, is known for catching a lot of crappie everywhere he goes. Even he was stunned.

“Probably the best two hours of fishing I have ever experienced,” he said. “I saw you guys pull up and it started right after you started fishing. It was bam, bam bam, one fish right after another for two hours. We had the limit and had to stop, but I’m betting that had we wanted to, we could have caught another 100.”

The place was a curved bank of backwater on the east side of the upper main lake, an area known as “Behind the Islands.” The depth ranged from a foot to 3½ feet, and the 200-yard square area offered various forms of cover, from pad stems to primrose to matted grass on the outer banks.

The fish related to all of it, and, well, none of it, too.

“We started by catching them on isolated pads, but then we stumbled on this one spot that’s just a big old bare bottom,” said Jimmy Carmen of Jackson. “There was no vegetation. Really, there was nothing at all, except for fish. They were piled in there, males and females, and we didn’t go a minute without a bite for two hours. We quit because we knew we were close to the limit and didn’t want to count, and danged sure didn’t want to clean any more than we had.”

So plentiful were the crappie in that one small cove that the air filled with the scent of spawning fish.

“I wouldn’t doubt that it’s the smell of all these fish being slung through the air,” Garavelli said laughing. “This is truly amazing.”

We fished the spot for about 90 minutes before Garavelli had to go to a business meeting. We pulled 42 from the hot spot in that time, and missed at least that many more.

We didn’t have a net and we lost a few at the boat and lost even more when we didn’t get a hookset.

Wednesday, back on the same spot — along with a dozen other boats from the previous day, we were disappointed. The spot yielded a few fish at sunrise, but it was slow.

But at about 10 o’clock, the same thing happened again, only on a smaller scale and about 100 yards down the bank.

For a solid hour Wednesday, a different partner and I put 32 fish in the boat.

“Good thing it isn’t always like this,” my partner Keith Patridge said. “I’d quit my job, probably get a divorce and go broke. Cause if it was like this every day, I’d never leave.”

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Got a fishing story to share, contact Bobby Cleveland at bobbyc7754@yahoo.com. Selected stories will be told on Ms-Sportsman.com and may be printed in our print edition.