 | Spring Crappies and Bluegills
By Al Lindner
Angling Edge TV
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As soon as the ice leaves natural lakes, crappies and bluegills are poised for movement. They rim the drop-offs outside shallow bays and channels, and at the first hint of warm, calm, sunny weather, begin crossing shallow flats to penetrate bays and channels. All it takes is a couple days of nice weather, and boom, they begin showing up along shallow shorelines, hugging the perimeter of the lake, soaking up the heat where sunshine warms soft, dark, wind-protected bottom. Watch a school of crappies enter a channel mouth, any you’ll see a nervous stampede dashing through the opening, heading for the back end of the channel. They don’t linger at the entrance, and typically won’t stop moving until they run out of room at the shallow back end. Here they seek out the best combination of cover and dark bottom, such as fallen trees, beaver lodges, logs, or some form of safety. Once clustered within a protective area, they change personality, trading their panicky movements for slow, subtle gliding interspersed with long periods of hovering. This soon after ice-out, their location has nothing to do with prespawn and nesting sites. That comes later. For now, they’re simply relating to warm water and cover, where the first plankton will begin to bloom and draw small minnows. The warming shallows trigger insect activity, providing food for bluegills. In short, the kitchen is coming to life. Early on, fish can be quite spooky, and refuse to chase lures or baits. Instead, you must dangle an offering right on or just above their noses, providing them time to react, move over for a look, examine, and finally rise to slurp a tentative meal. Casting and retrieving is simply too fast to get a response. You need a bobber presentation to dangle bait and keep it there, vulnerable, until fish respond. Long, thin floats like Thill balsa models are tailor-made for these conditions. Whether you choose a fixed float that attaches to your line with a spring, or elect to use a slip version and adjustable bobber stop, the basic premise is the same. Position a split shot or two on the line about a foot above your jig or baited hook, using just enough weight to avoid sinking the float. These skinny lightweight floats are much more sensitive than traditional round bobbers, and betray even the lightest bites without the fish feeling any resistance. At the slightest dip of the float, set the hook; don’t wait for it to go all the way down. In fact, if a fish rises to the bait, inhales it and moves an inch or two shallower, a properly weighted float will rise and tip over, indicating a bite. Set the hook! Crappies are vulnerable to a tiny 1/32-ounce feather or hair jig that barely breathes under the slightest wave action or rod tip movement. Light colors like yellow, white, pink or chartreuse imitate minnows, while darker browns or blacks imitate insects. Don’t overdo the action, or they won’t bite. Most of the time, you won’t need to add bait to trigger crappies. But if they’re finicky, slip a small crappie minnow onto the hook, inserting the hook point up through both lips, and let the struggling minnow tempt the fish into biting.
For bluegills, stick to even tinier jigs, like 1/64-ounce insect minnow imitations. Or simply use about a #6 single hook baited with a piece of night crawler. That should do the trick for average-sized fish. But if the fish are big and wary, switch to an entire small crawler, or perhaps a small leech—perhaps the finest bait of all for tempting big bluegills into biting. Use a long, 6 ½- to 9-foot light to medium-light spinning rod spooled with 4-pound-test mono where cover is sparse, beefing up to 6-pound where you need to quickly lift and hoist fish away from cover. The long rod facilitates long casts, accurate pitches between cover, and absorbs the shock of a bass striking your lure without breaking your line. As the weeks go by, the water warms and weed growth begins blooming, providing fish additional cover options. Both crappies and bluegills begin shifting more toward nesting sites, and begin building nests when the water temperature nears 60 F. Crappies love to spawn in deep reed beds, and areas with dark bottom and thick, tangled overhead cover host some of the biggest fish in the lake. Bluegills often spawn on sand grass bottoms along inside weed lines, and depending on water clarity, may spawn as little as a foot deep in dark-water lakes, to 6 to 10 feet in clear ones, with the largest ‘gills typically spawning deeper than the small ones. If you’re only seeing and catching small ones, try fishing a little deeper. Look for the telltale signs of pit-type nests swept out of sandy bottom by the males, indicating a colony of bluegills. Panfish are usually abundant, and it’s OK to keep a few for eating. Avoid over harvest of the larger specimens, however. They’re very valuable to maintaining the population at a healthy level, and you don’t want the successive years to host chiefly small panfish with little chance for a trophy.
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