Great fishing trips are memorable for good reason: Most times the fish have another agenda, or weather conditions stymie the best-laid plans. Crappies being crappies, you generally catch some. But those days of waylaying slab after slab or nailing a true trophy-size fish are far less frequent than we’d like, so they stand out in our recollections.

The In-Fisherman staff are a well-traveled lot, frequently fishing our home waters of Minnesota, in addition to trips for product testing, photography, and filming episodes of In-Fisherman Television. Several lessons emerge from collective experiences chasing crappies across the land.

Enjoy the Serendipitous Bite

Sometimes super crappie catches come as a surprise, even rewarding the unprepared. I’ll never forget the image of sail-like dorsals carving the surface of a quiet cove on Quabbin Reservoir in Massachusetts. I’d been plying the shallows for bass, but the huge black-and-gold flanks redirected my attention to the center of the bay.

With no panfish tackle aboard, I nonetheless enticed several monsters with a #375 A.C. Shiner and a 1/4-ounce Bass Buster spinnerbait. The rest of the school, all well over two pounds, meandered back into the depths. Today, Quabbin remains outstanding and underfished for crappie. It’s closed to fishing during winter, and access is limited to a few areas. A 25 hp limit means parts of this 25,000-acre impoundment are rarely visited.

Since that occasion in the late 1970s, I’ve learned that in this era of mobile and sophisticated anglers, big crappie are more likely in waters that are harder to get to, restricted in some way by regulations, or areas where crappies are not fished heavily.

Heavy Harvest Doesn’t Help

For years, Editor Matt Straw has pursued big panfish on waters across the U.S. and Canada. Yet his most memorable catch came years ago at a small lake in Michigan. “Though we lived in the city,” Straw relates, “we had a cabin on a lake in central Michigan where Dad and I would fish. When I was about 10, he built a wooden boat and was eager to try it out. We launched and anchored by a fallen tree, pitching bobbers and minnows into a likely looking fork in its branches. The bobber would sit for a few long seconds, then slowly be pulled down into the tree.

“Every cast produced a crappie, each one bigger than the last, until Dad pulled in one that we later measured at over 18 inches. We didn’t know anything about state records for fish like crappies. And we knew nothing of catch-and-release either, back in 1963. The 18-inch crappie was fried for dinner, like all the others we caught that day.

“Crappies no longer thrive in that lake,” Straw laments. “Nobody catches much there at all. And I can’t help thinking that, knowingly or not, my father and I played some part in the demise of that fishery. I’m sure that sad tale has played out on countless small waters across the northern states.