Creme Spoiler Shad

Jigging, twitching, snapping, and burning plastics have a definite place for crappies. On the other hand, no professional crappie anglers would argue that crappies are as prone to making reaction strikes as a barracuda. For crappies, slow and steady wins the race in most conditions. To make a classic swimbait slow down, use heavier monofilament line. Braids, being thinner than mono, allow swimbaits to drop too quickly for crappies most of the time. While I prefer 2- and 4-pound test for finessing crappies, 6- and even 8-pound-test mono are better choices with most classic swimbaits, slowing both the drop and the swim a little more. Heavier line also allows you to pitch into heavier cover and rip through dense weeds without breaking off. The fact that classic swimbaits fish heavy and fast limits them to summer and fall for crappies on a horizontal plane, though properly balanced horizontal swimbaits with a 90-degree eye extending straight up sometimes become excellent vertical tools for winter fishing in deep water.

Choose finesse swimbaits when you want to slow down even further, because many of them balance well with a 1/32-ounce head. However, shad bodies with blunt ends meant to match up with a swimbait-style jighead won’t operate at all with a head too light to pull it down fast enough on the drop to make the tail thump. That’s the key to matching jigs to plastics of this type. The tail should work perfectly on the drop. If not, the head is too light.

Tactical Review

On a private lake known for porcine panfish, we caught crappies last summer with small swimbaits while jigging, trolling, pitching, and drifting. It didn’t matter what the boat was doing, or what the wind was doing with the boat. The lake was so full of crappies that we finally just sat down and dangled swimbaits 20 feet behind the boat and about 5 feet down while drifting across the middle of the basin, because that worked as well as everything else with half the effort.

Pitching, as always, was the most fun. Classic swimbaits in crappie sizes can be thrown with an ultralight rod, but a medium-light rod in the 7- to 7½-foot range tends to work better with lines testing at 6 pounds or heavier. Crappies were everywhere, so we started fishing over and alongside weededges and clumps, selecting a 1.5-inch Creme Spoiler Shad and a Stanley Wedge Tail. The Spoiler Shad is lighter and smaller than most classics, allowing us to swim it slowly, while the Wedge Tail could be balanced with whatever jig weight we needed to get the job done.

Pulling the lure through the water beside the boat at various speeds provides clues about the speed required to keep swimbaits moving horizontally during a retrieve. Retrieve too fast and the lure rises. Retrieve too slow and it sinks. The optimal retrieve does neither, maintaining a pretty steady relationship between the lure and the surface of the lake. In this case, crappies were too shallow to see on sonar.

Out off the weededges we watched the sonar, determined the depths crappies were using, and pitched larger 2-inch classics. We counted them down to the level of the fish, pointed the rod tip down, and began a slow, steady retrieve. Crappies eventually stopped responding to slow and steady, so we added a twitch or two along the way and caught a few more before we began trolling and drifting across the basin.

Trolling and spider-rigging for crappies are similar in terms of speed but different in lead lengths and the number of rods employed. In Minnesota we’re allowed only one rod per person. Spider-rigging poorly describes a boat with two “legs.” A spider needs at least 6 legs, and that’s two short of being anatomically correct. But trolling with swimbaits is a perfect way to cover a lot of water while looking for scattered pods of fish along weedlines, big flats, and large main-lake humps, and it gets the lures back behind the boar farther than spider-rigging, which is really only an advantage in very clear water.

Crappies aren’t built for speed. We can’t expect them to accelerate and maintain high speeds over any appreciable distance, so techniques like these need to be slowed down. That simple fact bonds all three boat-presentation techniques—trolling, spider-rigging, and drifting for crappies—to the trolling motor. Control drifting allows the wind to do most of the work, but the trolling motor is required for course corrections. Even when trolling, which is the fastest of these three techniques, I set the speed low and employ a stop-and-go approach most of the time.

Whatever speed you want to maintain, there’s a swimbait that will match it at the depth you want to cover. When crappies are pinned to bottom on humps or slopes below the weedline, slow down and allow classic baits to touch bottom every 5 feet or so. When it touches, lift it gently, then slowly lower the rod back to its original position. It’s almost vertical-jigging and it’s almost trolling. It’s related to a walleye technique called snapjigging, but with less vigor and speed. Some call it strolling. Whatever it is, it works, and it locates crappies relatively quickly when they can be tough to see on sonar.

We’ve written a lot, lately, about fishing plastics “in space” for smallmouth bass. The same technique works for suspended crappies with finesse swimbaits and light heads. Just pitch one out on a 1/64- to 1/16-ounce head, depending on the depths crappies seem to be using and slowly feed line until the bait is 80 to 100 feet behind the boat. Use the trolling motor to navigate around humps, across flats, along breaks, and along mudlines, keeping the pace under 2 mph most of the time, allowing the bait to slowly rise and fall on turns and during speed changes, but moving horizontally most of the time. Of course, where spider-rigging is allowed it produces more crappies in a shorter period of time, but fishing swimbaits in space puts the rod in your hands where you feel every strike. And it tends to work better than spider-rigging in very clear water.

The appearance of small, soft swimbaits in the 1- to 3-inch range appealed immediately to those who like to swim jigs for crappies. We already knew plastics with action tails worked, but these new units seemed sleeker, more natural, and effective even before removed from the package. Sometimes first impressions are right on the money.