Key areas also include the mouths of bays and openings to sloughs, backwaters, or any protected, shallower area crappies use during the summer months. Places to look include the widest areas between 20- to 40-foot contours outside the mouth of a bay on the main lake. If the contours form a cup or crease of slightly deeper water pointing toward the embayment area, the entire area can become important for crappies. Here detritus from weeds tumbling down slopes during turnover in past years has mixed with the varying bottom contents to create rich fields for aquatic life. Surrounding structure and depth serve to stabilize the environs as well.

Transition bites almost always take place over the softer substrates on the basin side of the zone, but the best bites seldom occur far from areas where breaks meet the basin. Bloodworms, insect larvae, and other invertebrates are the targets, so the softer side of the substrate divide tends to hold the most active fish. In some cases, transition-zone crappies can be marked 1 to 3 feet off bottom with sonar, but they often peg themselves to the muck. Anything that looks like a bump on the bottom reading could be a crappie, a perch, or another variety of panfish during fall. Underwater cameras can be very useful in determining what these areas look like and what the bottom is composed of, so no rocks or other anomalies can be mistaken for feeding fish during future sweeps through the area.

Other Fall Patterns

Crappies in many systems react differently to the same set of circumstances. Canadian Shield lakes, the northernmost frontier for giant crappies, cool soonest within their natural range and serve as a model for many deep lakes that hold the fish far to the south of these rocky, wilderness-enshrouded lakes.

Cooling water slows crappie metabolism here, as everywhere else. They tend to locate in huge bays during summer, occupying the shallow water that’s denied to them for half the year in these harsh, northern environments. As the water begins to cool (in August, most years) fish move slowly toward winter habitat, generally within the bay itself, or outside a smaller bay into a larger one. They move slowly within a general area, foraging. Once found, they generally remain in the vicinity for a week to several weeks.

Fall location centers around quick access to deep water. Sharp drop-offs that eventually break into 20 to 40 feet of water tend to concentrate the most fish. Gradually tapering flats are less appealing. The “elevator theory” of autumn location holds for many species of fish in Shield lakes, including crappies, which seem to prefer to descend straight down 10 to 25 feet when conditions get rough, rather than be forced to travel horizontally for several hundred yards or more to reach preferred depths. And conditions can get rough in a hurry on the Shield.

The sharp-dropping edges of shoreline points, the steep edges of deep (20 to 25 feet down) rock humps, and the saddles between reefs or small islands situated within or just outside bays that provide good summer habitat are the most logical places to begin hunting for crappies in late August and September. As in other natural lakes, the transition zone from soft to hard bottom at the base of the drop-off surrounding these and other structures is a key area. A school of crappies using a sunken hump, for example, might slowly circle the base of the hump, foraging on invertebrates or on baitfish attracted to the area for the same reasons. Crappies follow the transition zones around structure like a trail. They can be anywhere in relatively close proximity to the transition zone—feeding on bottom 25 feet away (usually on the soft-substrate side of the transition), suspended 2 to 10 feet above the transition, or anywhere just off the structure.

Crappies can, in fact, locate anywhere over the deeper flat (20 to 40 feet deep, in most instances) around the structure. When they suspend, they won’t be in the middle of the bay a mile from structure but generally within 200 feet of it. Crappies can be found suspending in saddle areas between two islands, or between the tip of a shoreline point and an adjacent sunken hump, or off a deep cabbage bed, or between two rockpiles on a 20-foot flat, or within any other example of confined open water in the bay. In other types of lakes—shallower prairie lakes, mid-latitude mesotrophic lakes—crappies can be found suspending in very similar (if not identical) areas in fall, but these areas tend to be within the main lake on those other bodies of water.