“We can handle 6 rods, but many anglers may want to just use one or two, as it’s a lot of work,” Coleman admits. “But when you find fish in early spring, you can fill a 15-fish limit in a few minutes. Most anglers miss this early bite.” Once the water warms further, crappies spread out more and Reelfoot’s countless stumps also produce. Smaller male crappies move into the pads, as well.
“Most stumps stick out of the water, but crappies spawn on the hollowed-out stumps that lie below the surface,” Coleman reports. “You generally find a group of fish in one area. When you probe back into the flooded forests, you may come upon patches of lily pads surrounded by trees. Big black crappies sometimes pack into those areas.” To fish stumps as well as lily pads, Capps and Coleman fish 1/16-ounce custom jigheads made with a #2 Gamakatsu hook and tubes from Mid-South Tackle. Lime-chartreuse is their number-one pick. When the water’s cold, they tip with a waxworm or small minnow.
Brushpile Bonanzas
In other types of waters, natural cover is sparse. Enter the brushpilers. In many regions, building artificial cover has become a key complement to fishing, something you do during fall and winter to ensure a good bite come spring. As trees flooded years ago rot away, avid anglers chop and tie and weight and drop all sorts of cover to replace them.
In much of the crappie’s range and for much of the season, pole fishing can be the best approach around these attractors. From his home in the nation’s heartland around Lawrence, Kansas, In-Fisherman Field Editor Ned Kehde provides a perspective on pole presentations in that region.
Pole Tactics, Kansas Style
Kehde: Since the 1990s, more crappie anglers on the large impoundments of northeastern Kansas have been wielding long spinning outfits. During this period, Denny Tryon of Ozawkie, Kansas, has become one of the maestros of this technique, and along the way his name has topped the leader board at many tournaments.
Tryon’s favorite rod is a 9-foot B ’n’ M model SHSS 92 Sam Heaton rod. Its customized Tennessee-style 20-inch cork handle sports a Shimano Sedona 500 FA spinning reel spooled with 6-pound-test clear Berkley Trilene XT. Tryon favors a 1/16-ounce jig dressed either with a soft-plastic tube or a combination of chenille and marabou.
One of this rod’s many virtues, Tyron says, is a thin diameter, which more easily cuts through the wind that frequently plagues anglers on Kansas’ flatland reservoirs. Thicker blanks catch the wind, which bows the rod. The resulting bend limits an angler’s ability to detect the delicate bite of a crappie.
Tryon estimates his Heaton rod has hoisted more than 8,000 crappies across his gunnels in the past 8 years. He’s enjoyed incidental Donnybrooks with a 34-pound flathead catfish, 15-pound channel catfish, 10-pound wiper, and other hefty specimens without breaking this fragile-looking rod or its light line.
During much of the year, Tryon fishes manmade brushpiles with a vertical presentation. He starts on the outside and gradually works into the core of the pile, allowing the jig to fall through the limbs all the way to the bottom without snagging. He emphasizes that probing the bottom is one of the critical elements of his presentation. This, of course, takes a deft hand to accomplish.
While probing the labyrinth of branches, he periodically allows the jig to suspend motionless for several seconds, at times gently twitching it. Once the jig reaches the bottom, he deadsticks then twitches it. If that doesn’t elicit a strike, he carefully lifts the jig towards the top of the pile and then repeats the presentation in another segment of brush.
