“Crappies can be very active at night, even in 40°F water,” Huckabee says. “The bite may not last all night but generally lasts a few hours. It may suddenly turn on at 10 p.m. and last until midnight; the next night it might be 8 p.m. to 2 a.m., and the next, 9 to 11. I’ve not been able to discern any rhyme or reason to the timing. It has nothing to do with the moon, the conditions, or the barometric pressure. You just have to fish until they start biting.”

Huckabee uses the same tandem rig (two tube jigs about a foot apart) on 8-pound mono for fishing vertically in those same kinds of riverine habitats at the top of reservoirs that Kehde talked about. “Most of my fish are in the river or the riverine portion of the upper reservoir,” Huckabee says. “We catch some trophy crappies in winter, mixed in with smaller fish. I don’t think I could target bigger fish, especially at night. You just weed through them. When vertically jigging, I use a 10-foot Dippin’ Stick, a signature Todd Huckabee Quantum rod, and in winter I generally use two 1/8-ounce jigs. I never need bait. Tubes work just fine in cold water.”

In Texas, John Hale of Stanley Jigs finds crappies use the same pattern, with river crappies dropping into the upper end of the reservoir at the onset of winter. “On the upper end of the lake, during a warm spell you can find crappies 8 to 12 feet deep,” Hale says. “But on Lake Fork and Sam Rayburn, those river crappies enter the top of the reservoir and scatter. You can still find them in the river channel on Toledo Bend. To me, there’s no rhyme or reason to it. It makes no difference what the water temperature is. Crappies start to scatter in December, making it hard to find concentrations of fish. In February and March we begin to see concentrations again on natural cover, like bushes and grass.”

Lonnie Stanley, president of Stanley Jigs, often finds crappies in depths of 8 to 12 feet in the upper reaches of Sam Rayburn during winter. “Crappies that drop down out of the river suspend 8 to 12 feet down off the edge of the river channel, right at the same level as the lip of the bank,” Stanley says. “On warm days they leave the river channel and wander up little branches and sloughs with water temperatures in the 42°F range, and they stay there until the next cold front comes through. Pitching a little Stanley Wedgetail on a 1/8-ounce ball-head jig and lifting it off bottom in 8 to 12 feet of water is one of my favorite tactics. I pull it 2 feet off bottom and ease it back down, using 6- to 8-pound line on a medium-light All-Star rod.

“In mid-January, when it’s as cold as it can get down here, crappies group in the river channel, but they remain in 8 to 12 feet of water. A cork and live minnow drifting along the breaks of river channels in the upper portions of any of our lakes down here can put a ton of fish in the boat in the wintertime.”