Freshwater Strategies: Crappie

CRAPPIE ARE LITTLE SLICES of angel food cake with fins. Few things that swim taste as good, and most are more difficult to catch.

I caught dozens of crappie before ever fishing for them on purpose. As it turns out, they will eat a lot of small, inexpensive bass lures, the kind an aspiring bass fisherman can afford on a modest allowance. My young friends and I probably would have caught more crappie, too, except that our hookset technique was not altogether compatible with the species’ delicate mouths.

We were big fans of the live minnow back then, and liked to get our money’s worth. Rather than pay a premium for bigger baits, we spent less per dozen on smaller minnows but got more dozens. We called ourselves “bass fishermen” when anyone asked, but in hindsight, we were not.

It wasn’t until I was older, well into my teens and toting a driver’s license, that deliberately fishing for crappie sounded like much of a good idea. Before then, I considered crappie an ideal species for the young and the frail, fishermen who didn’t know enough to catch bass and couldn’t stand the smell of a proper catfish bait. Also, before then, I hadn’t eaten many crappie.

One of the first trips on which I targeted white perch specifically took place in a lake on the golf course at Quail Valley Country Club in Missouri City. One of the area’s first courses that wound through a neighborhood, QVCC had no fences to dissuade young fishermen, and it was easy enough to elude the occasional course marshal. Better yet, a couple of guys who lived in the master-planned community had already laid the groundwork and figured out where to park our cars so they would not be ticketed or towed.

My friends and I fished a lot of private and semi-private water without permission. We fancied ourselves quite the rebels when, in truth, we weren’t doing anything so wrong that anyone cared about stopping us.

The best crappie spot at QVCC was beneath a big willow tree that hung over a wide oxbow lake, the still remains of a creek that wandered across what was once a cow pasture and now a fairway. Course architects had placed the hazard just beyond the area where smart and good golfers’ 3-wood tee shots landed. They hit lay-ups to the water’s edge and then were left with mid-iron approaches to a receptive green. It was an easy hole if you knew not to hit driver off the tee.

Better players were usually in a good mood as they approached down the lush fairway. They asked what we were catching and wanted to look at our stringers. Members and guests who overcooked their tee shots and bounced them into the water could be counted on to shake fists and give us a list of reasons why we couldn’t stay. We acted as though we were gathering our tackle until they finished out the hole and went to the next tee, then got back to fishing.

The crappie we hauled home from that golf course were some of the best-tasting fish I ever ate. In hindsight, it could have been that their flesh was loaded with fertilizer and pesticide runoff from the maintenance of all that thick Bermuda grass. More optimistically, maybe the fish got unusually high amounts of a specific food, like June bugs or grasshoppers, in their diets.

I ate a lot of fresh crappie until my friends and I got too old to pretend we were just innocent little kids who didn’t know any better than to be where we were. Since then, I’ve done a fair amount of crappie fishing on several of the finest reservoirs in the state, and a few more lakes too small to be on any maps but nonetheless held great populations of white perch. Importantly, I received instruction on most of those trips from some of the best crappie fishermen in the state.

One of many good things about crappie is that the law allows a generous daily sack of the prolific breeders; a single trip can satisfy kitchen needs for weeks or months, depending on the size of your fish, your family, and your freezer. Since they are not worth squat for sport, there is really no reason to go crappie fishing again until you have depleted current fillet stocks.

Much of a lake’s reputation for crappie fishing depends on the success of people who fish it regularly. Larry King lived up to his regal name among crappie fishermen at Sam Rayburn and was in great part responsible for the lake’s high standing among crappie anglers through the ‘80s and ‘90s. Butch Terpe was as good as they got on Lake Conroe; his hundreds of brush piles produce thousands of fish through the course of any season, and people sometimes give excessive credit to the lake for its fine crappie fishing, when it was Terpe’s expertise that loaded their boxes.

Every reservoir has its share of good crappie fishermen, but usually no more than two or three anglers achieve local legend status as the best on the pond. Those fishermen seem to be lucky more often than not, although luck plays virtually no part in the time they spend around cleaning tables. Follow their leads, and you can enjoy fresh crappie most any time you want it.

 

Note: This is an excerpt from the chapter on crappie from Pike’s book Freshwater Strategies: A Practical Approach to Texas Freshwater Fishing. You can get it—and our many other titles—from our online store at fishgame.com/product-category/books.

 

Email Doug Pike at ContactUs@fishgame.com

 

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