Crappies like cover, most of the time. Sure, I’ve found them bunched in open water, sitting 40 feet down with another 60 below their bellies. And sometimes scattered across clean sandflats. But mostly they like to nestle among tree branches or hide among tufts of lake grass. Their conversion to cover is never stronger than in spring, when crappies feed in the shallows prior to spawning and then nest in protected coves and banks.

Long poles are natural for probing this sort of cover. The thicker it is, the more that poles get the nod over casting approaches. At some spots where I’ve found spring crappies, the holes in cattails and maidencane simply did not allow a cast.

Traditionally, the term pole refers to a long blank lacking reel or guides, with line passing through its length or secured to the tip. Here, we also include long rods with reels and guides in this category.

Clear water and thinner cover suggest a casting approach, as you may need to cover more water to find groups of fish, and you also may need to remain farther back to avoid spooking them. During some springtime phases, crappies can be extremely spooky, while at others they seem almost too gullible. You’ve got to try several options.

Poling Places

On backwaters of the Mississippi in Minnesota, black crappies push into sloughs and old oxbows soon after the ice breaks up. They instinctively find black-bottom areas with old marsh grass, sticks, and beaver lodges—spots you can’t even get into come late June, without a canoe. At first, fish hold in slightly deeper channels and holes that sometimes separate floating bogs buoyed by swamp gas. Here, spooky fish must be fished by casting—lobbing bubble-fly combos or pitching lightweight plastics.

But as waters warm and the spawn approaches, new vegetation thickens. Crappies push into this thicker cover, where pole fishing comes into its own. I’ve used poles as long as 14 feet, with a rather fast tip and enough backbone to pull a pounder up and out. Line’s not an issue in these combat conditions, though I suppose you might get more bites with 4-pound test. But breakoffs would be too frequent. Go with 10-pound mono and you still have to retie every couple of hours.

Fused braided lines like Berkley FireLine or those with a coating like Stren Super Braid and Spiderwire Stealth also are good options, though you should switch to a softer rod to avoid tearing out hooks when pulling and landing fish. I’ve used poles with and without a reel and prefer those with a modern mill for adjusting line length and to provide drag when needed, both to battle the occasional lunker or, more commonly, a wandering largemouth; or to tighten down when you have to bend out a hook snagged on an unseen brushpile.

In vegetated lakes and reservoirs, cover rarely is as thick. But wild rice beds and bulrushes also are prime spots for spring poling. Because bulrush clumps are dense and wild rice provides a fine overhead mat where crappie feel secure, you can approach within 10 or 12 feet, even in the clearest lakes.

Santee-Cooper Perspectives

Near the southern end of the crappie’s range, similar patterns apply earlier in the year. Though he fishes crappie tournaments across the country, Whitey Outlaw calls Santee-Cooper home, a lake renowned for producing good bites for black and white crappie. “You can catch them year ’round but the shallow bite generally starts around the first of March,” Outlaw says.

“Black crappies quickly move from deeper channels where they’d spent the winter, to the back ends of creeks and swampy areas full of cypress trees. Black crappies here like grass and I find them around ’gator grass, duckweed, and water hyacinths. While there’s not much hydrilla or other underwater weeds left, the cypress trees are thriving, and crappies flock into them, too.”

Outlaw adds that at other waters he visits on the tournament trail, cypress trees always hold crappies. “But not all trees are productive. I have what I call honey-hole trees because they produce fish year after year. Some of them sit in a bit deeper water, and others are on little points or underwater features. But some just have something the fish like for unknown reasons. If you’re exploring a new area, keep moving until you contact fish.”

At Santee-Cooper and elsewhere, crappies shift up and down in the water column during the day. Early in the morning, they’re deeper and move toward the surface as the day warms, particularly when it’s sunny and mild.

To fish vegetation and cypress trees, Outlaw uses the 10-foot Santee Elite B ’n’ M pole. It has no eyes and the line passes through the blank. “The cover often is so thick you can’t swing or pitch a jig,” he says. “I draw the jig to the tip, position it over the hole I want to fish, sometimes no bigger than a quarter, then drop it straight down.

“With 10-pound-test mono, you can hoist and snatch a fish right into the boat in one motion. It takes a bit of practice so you don’t knock him off on the side of the boat. In lakes where cover isn’t as dense, I switch to an 11- or 12-foot pole, which lets you fish a bit farther from the boat. Where cover is sparser, crappies can get a bit spookier and you have to reach out for them.

“At Santee-Cooper, black crappies move up first and spawn first; whites come in about a month later. They tend to spawn around the full moon, from 4 days before to 4 days after. But the water temperature has to be right.”

As in many spring scenarios, Outlaw prefers a 1/16-ounce tube jig. And he has a recommendation for color. “Wherever you find cypress trees,” he says, “you can’t go wrong with a black-chartreuse tube. But whatever combo you choose, be sure to have some chartreuse in it.”

Outlaw says the bite continues through April and into May, particularly if it’s been a cool spring. He admits that drought conditions in the Southeast have hurt fishing there. “The water is 10 feet low now, and that’s a lot of good cover that’s out of water,” he notes.

Pad Patterns

Reelfoot Lake is Tennessee’s only natural lake, reportedly formed by the New Madrid Earthquake of 1811, when the Mississippi River flowed backwards to fill it. Full of shallow swamps and bayous, it’s been a haven for crappies ever since. Steve Coleman, one-half of the celebrated team of Capps and Coleman, the 2007 Angler Team of the Year on the Crappie Masters Tournament Trail, calls nearby Tiptonville home.

He and Ronnie Capps take advantage of the lake’s abundant lily pads when out to catch a few for dinner or when competing against other teams. “Our pad pattern starts in early spring, when the big female white crappies get into the old lily-pad stalks. After winter only the stalks are left, barely jutting above the surface. Crappies may concentrate in a spot twice the size of your boat, within an acre of pad stalks.”

To locate fish, the team deploys six 14-foot B ’n’ M Capps & Coleman Series Trolling Rods, a sensitive medium-light model, and troll ultra-slow through the stalks. The length of the rods keeps jigs far enough from the boat to avoid spooking fish, while efficiently covering water. They constantly work the rods, picking up a jig to pass over stems and setting it back down, only to adjust another.

“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.

Besides this vertical approach, Tryon also pitches a jig to the front or sides of a pile, so it slowly falls to the bottom in pendulum fashion, at times allowing the jig to swing across the top of the brush and periodically ricochet off a branch.

Spring crappies often favor shallow piles where they may also spawn. To probe such thickets that may lie in just a couple feet of water, Tryon switches to an Outlaw IM-7 model 1102 Crappie Rod with a Shimano Sedona 500 FA spinning reel and 6-pound mono. He notes this 11-footer has more backbone than the Heaton model, and this power helps to rapidly extract feisty spawning fish from the quagmire of limbs.

Throughout the year, he fishes brushpiles from 2 feet down to 22 feet. To ply deep brush or when the wind is testy, he switches to heavier jigs, either a 3/32-ounce jig or two 1/16-ouncers spread 20 inches apart.

Crappies sometimes vacate the brushpiles and move to riprap or boulder-strewn areas. When that occurs, Tryon maintains his vertical approach, allowing the jig to graze bottom and occasionally bounce off rocks, by easing along with his bow-mounted electric. At times, however, he pitches the jig and allows it to slowly swing back to the boat, as it travels along the bottom and glances off rocks.

Outside the Spawn Period, however, crappies often are widely scattered along these rocky environs, and you must cover a lot of terrain at a variety of depths to find them. He says it’s essential to maintain a methodical, unhurried approach.

One advantage of a long rod is in keeping shadows and boat noise away from the quiet spots he fishes. By adroitly manipulating his trolling motor and long rod, Tryon remains about 8 feet from the fish he’s trying to tempt. In his eyes, it’s the stealthiest way to vertically present jigs at various depths in snag-infested lairs.

The Hibdons’ Dock Tactics

Kehde: About 170 miles east of the waters Tryon fishes lies Lake of the Ozarks. In late fall, its crappies tend to gather under some of the countless floating docks that clutter this waterway’s 1,150 miles of shoreline. During this season, noted Missouri bass pros Guido and Dion Hibdon, father and son, are home from the bass tournament circuits to enjoy many autumn days fishing for crappies under these structures.

To lure fish holding under docks, the Hibdons use 10-foot spinning rods to reach around boats and over elements of boat lifts. Spooling with 10-pound-test Spiderwire Stealth and using a 1/32-ounce jig, they deftly pitch to corners of the boat slip and swim the jigs a foot or so under the dock floats.

Dion Hibdon notes that a 1/16-ounce jig sinks too fast, making it difficult to slowly swim it just a foot or two under the docks, where crappie like to hold in late fall. He finds that the long pole allows the 1/32-ounce jig to virtually float as it moves beneath the dock, offering a similar appeal as a jig-and-bobber combination.

If they don’t contact crappies under dock floats, the Hibdons may check brushpiles that often are dropped into corners and along the sides of docks. They prefer to slowly swim or swing the jigs past the brush, but if crappies seem tentative they experiment with a vertical presentation, lowering a jig to hover motionless next to or slightly inside a pile.

Bamboozling Crappies at Lake Greeson

Farther south in Arkansas, the guide team of Darryl Morris and Jerry Blake use long poles to probe artificial cover on Lake Greeson, clear-cut by the Corps of Engineers prior to impoundment 50 years ago. “And for some reason, underwater vegetation doesn’t grow here either,” Blake notes.

“As a result, many anglers sink brushpiles, and the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission has gotten involved as well. We feel the structures have become more than fish attractors; they can aid spawning success by providing cover for young fish. Elm makes a nice pile, but those trees quickly rot, as do gum trees. We’ve discovered that bamboo or what’s locally called giant cane makes a fine, long-lasting attractor.

“We call them crappie condos, as crevices among bamboo stalks give young fish plenty of places to hide. Bamboo structures, in the water over four years now, are still providing cover and producing fish. Giant cane is native and plentiful in the area and when you harvest it, the plant grows to useable size within a year, so we have a steady supply.

“Crappie condos include 20 freshly cut bamboo stalks 12 to 15 feet tall, anchored with a 5-gallon bucket of QuickCrete. As we can carry 8 condos on a pontoon boat, we build and sink them in sets of 8.” They also build and place horizontal piles for spawning habitat and to replicate fallen shoreline trees.

Crappies spawn around this shallow cover, and newly hatched fry hide within. “The Game and Fish Commission has started providing us the material to make them,” Blake adds, “and we estimate we’ve planted about 240,000 cubic feet of bamboo cover in Greeson. In 2007, we planted 314 attractors.” (For specifics of bamboo building and photographs, check Jerry Blake’s website, actionfishingtrips.com.)

When not building or planting piles, Blake and Morris fish their bamboo attractors with poles and jigs. When crappies move shallow, starting around the end of February with water temperatures rising into the low to mid-50°F range, they find the fish immediately around certain piles. A hot bite occurs around the spawn, which typically occurs from late March into early April in creek arms and later in the main lake.

Instead of the popular tube jig, they’ve found best success with hair jigs, rigged with and without a small slipfloat. “Slater’s Jigs builds some fine ones of bucktail and kiptail, which is calf tail,” Morris reports. “The hair has a subtle, natural action you can’t get with plastic. We like ’em small for dipping into these piles, no heavier than 1/16-ounce. The 12-foot super-sensitive B ’n’ M Sam Heaton rod is ideal, matched with a Shakespeare or Pflueger ultralight reel. “Crappies get in bamboo in just a couple feet of water, and we fish jigs above them—not more than 6 inches deep, in many cases. Raise the tip of the pole to slowly pull the jig along, up, and over bamboo stalks then down into the pockets.

“I tell clients, ’Give it to ’em then take it away’. When crappies see it moving away, they rush out and engulf the little jig and you can watch the action.”

The guides report that Greeson’s populations of black and white crappies are very healthy right now, with good numbers of 15-inch fish and occasional specimens over 17 inches. Two factors have contributed: abundant threadfin shad and manmade habitat.

Pole time is here, so let’s be pitchin’ and doodlin’ and dippin’, enjoying some tasty crappie dinners—and of course, releasing slabs for the future.

*Ned Kehde, Lawrence, Kansas, is an In-Fisherman Field Editor and frequent contributor.