Arizona Crappie All Year
Crappie can be caught year-round, no matter where in Arizona you live. Dedicated anglers even catch them through the ice. At the other extreme, desert dwellers sit over lights at night during the summer and catch them. Crappie are delicious as well as abundant, and we are also blessed by having more than our share of really big ones, too. Here are some crappie basics:
How To Catch Crappie
Jigging from a boat:
Locate crappie on the graph or find a good brush pile or tree or rockpile in the water. Crappie will be shallow during the spawn, then follow creek channels out toward deeper water as it warms up. Keep the boat over the structure and drop your jig down to the bottom until the line goes slack and stops, then touch your rod tip to the water=s surface and reel until the line is taut. Give the reel two or three more cranks, then start to raise and lower the jig slowly.
WATCH YOUR LINE! Crappie will often take the jig on the fall. There may not be a bump B your line will simply go slack when you KNOW it=s not on the bottom. If the crappie are spread out you can just let the jig out behind the boat and drag it around just off the bottom. Use 1/8 or 1/16-ounce jigheads and 2″ grubs for best results. Also good: marabou jigs, tiny tube jigs. Chartreuse, white, smoke/sparkle, and red/white are always good colors. So is yellow, especially for the marabou jigs. At Roosevelt, a green and yellow or blue, black, and chartreuse are popular.
With a bobber (from shore or from a boat)
Crappie feed UP. It=s better to be too shallow than to be too deep. They are also sneaky. They may not pull a bobber down, so use floats that will tip over to signal slack line. That way you=ll see the bite even if they are coming toward you with the bait. Minnows are always good if you can get them, but also try the same little jigs as above. Keep the weight as light as possible.
Trolling
If you have a GPS unit, use it to keep your speed at about .1 mph. The GPS is also handy for taking you back to a school once you=ve passed over it. Tie two jigs on each line, about two feet apart. Crappie guide Art Chamberlin recommends marking your line so you know how deep your jigs are. Make one hash mark at 30 feet, two at 42 feet, three at 54 feet. When the two marks at 42 feet are staying about an inch and a half out of the water, you know you=re going about the right speed, and your jigs will be running 12 to 15 feet deep. This is usually the perfect depth anywhere in AZ, says Art.
In spring and early summer, keep the boat over 18 to 25 feet of water, but keep the jigs running at 12 to 15 feet deep. Any bumps will be fish because the jigs are not touching bottom. Best trolling is on calm, sunny days.
Choosing a jig
The pea head jig is an old standby. The round head gives the pea head its name, and they are available in a variety of sizes. Curt Rambo, the reigning crappie guru of Arizona, has used up tons of pea heads over the years. He chooses based almost entirely on one factor: how deep the fish are. The shallower the fish, the lighter the weight. In spring if he’s casting to shore, he’ll go to a 1/32-ounce pea head. If the fish are over 25 feet deep, he might be using a ¼-ounce jig.
Curt fishes vertically most of the time, so he finds that the round head jigs are just fine. He’ll take a handful of them and rig them up the night before he’s going out, using Super Glue to fasten the heads of his grubs to the pea heads. Pea heads are easy to find, come in a huge variety of sizes and colors, and they are relatively cheap. They may not always hang straight, especially since the cheaper ones use the same size hook no matter how heavy the jig head is. But since bass fisherman are increasingly fond of peaheads, it’s a lot easier now to find smaller heads with big hooks.
Structure Proof Jigs are round-head jigs that are designed with a curve to the hook that puts the point directly behind the head. This means that you can rig any plastic trailer weedless and fish it through the brush and weeds. They come in a variety of powder-coated colors, and the eyes are never painted shut. The hooks are on the small side, but as the fish struggles, it sets the hook on itself. For fishermen who like to bounce jigs off trees and rocks, these jigs are the nuts.
Dart heads or minnow heads have pointed noses and slender bodies, so they move more easily through the water and slip through weeds and thick brush with more finesse. Curt Rambo uses dart heads whenever he fishes a swimming bait like the Crème Lit’l Fishie. Curt uses these swimming baits for vertical presentations, too. But they really excel when you need to move the bait horizontally.
The original Gitzit tube lure was invented by Bobby and Garry Garland of Arizona for the ultra-clear waters and spooky fish of Lake Mead. Fished correctly, the tube jig drops very slowly and spirals down as it falls. Bobby and Garry made the first ones by dipping finishing nails into worm plastic. Nowadays you can get tubes just about anywhere, but Canyon Plastics still makes the originals and the best.
To get a tube to spiral, rig it on a special cylinder-shaped tube jig head. You might have to use a little spit to get it to slide inside the tube, then just squeeze to get the eye to stick out. Tie on with a loop knot, and make sure you drop the lure on a slack line. It can’t spiral without the slack. Garry says that the main thing to remember when you’re fishing a Gitzit is to be patient and let it do its thing. “Don’t move the rod much when the tube is falling,” he says, “and keep an eye on your line or you’ll miss most of the bites.”
Targeting the big ones
The key to catching giants is to change the way you think, says Oklahoma crappie pro Todd Huckabee. “You have to stop fishing small,” Todd says, “and when you do catch a big one, don’t stop to celebrate. If big ones are on the feed, you need to keep hunting while it lasts.”
“Hunting” is the key word there. Todd doesn’t fish like a regular crappie fisherman. He fishes like a bass fisherman. He moves around and fishes isolated cover. The down side? Well if it’s possible to have a down side to catching monster slabs, it would have to be that when you’re hunting giants you’re not going to have many days where you’re boating one fish after another. The reason that really big fish are so exciting is that they are out of the ordinary. If you caught twenty of them a day every day it just wouldn’t be all that exhilarating any more.
If you’re really serious about catching a trophy you have to start with the absolute basics, says Todd. “First of all, you have to go to a lake that has big crappie. You can spend all day on a lake and if there aren’t any big ones there you’re not gonna catch one,” he says. “Find out where the big crappies live and go there.” In Arizona, that usually means Roosevelt or San Carlos, although places like the Colorado River lakes and Bartlett also produce some nice slabs.
Pre-spawn crappie are usually biggest, but Todd catches trophy fish all year long. “I’ve had the most success in shallower, less clear water and on more isolated pieces of cover. Big crappie are like big bass: they don’t like crowds,” he says. “Avoid community holes. Every now and then somebody will pull a nice fish out of a community hole, but most of the time the biggest fish won’t live in an area with 400 little fish.”
You also need to use bigger baits. For some reason, when people fish with minnows they want the big ones, but when it comes to artificials they want to use little tiny ones. Big bait, big fish, Todd says, and he likes a chunky 2-inch Yum Beavertail. “Everybody thinks it’s too big,” he says, “but I’ve caught crappie with 5-inch shad in their bellies. The Beavertail is definitely not too big.”
He sticks the Beavertail (or a Yum Curlytail) on a 3/16-ounce Crappie Pro jighead. In dirty water black and pink is good, and for stained water he’ll choose a Carolina pumpkin/chartreuse bait. “I never cast for crappie,” Huckabee says. “I use a really long rod and dip it.” Todd goes right for the heart of the structure first off because the biggest fish will have the prime spot, and when he says he uses a long rod, he means it. His are mostly nine feet long. Drop your lure down and keep the line tight because a really big fish will usually take it instantly, he warns. “They just hammer it like you’re pitchin’ a jig for bass.”