Monster Pans

Trophy-size panfish are the latest frontier for anglers who like big fish. As we’ve said in In-Fisherman, a 1-pound bluegill in most regions is rarer than a 6-pound bass and likely older. Same is true of a 2- or 21⁄2-pound crappie, depending on the region you’re fishing. In some especially productive waters, it takes a crappie close to 3 pounds to reach true trophy status, but consider that’s half the size of the all-tackle record.

Once you catch such a fish, use catch-and-release or selective harvest as your guide to conservation of fish populations. For eating, keep only a reasonable number of smaller fish, releasing large or trophy-size fish to boost the quality of crappie fishing in the future.

Big crappies don’t seem as critical to successful reproduction as big male bluegills, but releasing them certainly helps maintain trophy fisheries longer and may blunt the cyclical fall of many great waters. Keeping a special fish for a once-in-a-lifetime wallmount is fine, though top taxidermists now offer excellent replica mounts of crappies.

Crappie Windows to the New World

Southern teams have a solid advantage in college baseball. The first crack of the bat echoes through the ivy by the first of February in Georgia and Florida. A month to six weeks after Gators and Bulldogs take the field, Wolverines and Buckeyes continue to practice indoors, waiting for glaciers to recede from the diamonds.

By the same solar coincidence, crack-of-the-bat crappies take to the shallows first in the South each year.

North or South, crappie fishing is a year-round activity. Well, OK—there’s a week or two up North when the ice is too rotten to walk on. But shallow lakes open early, and deep lakes have safe ice longer; so most years, we see little or no pause in the activity. But, North or South, a window opens each spring when crappies are drawn up—a point in time when activity levels increase, and crappies coalesce into tighter groups in shallower habitat, or at least, closer to the surface.

What if you won the lottery and decided to follow that magic window north? The journey would last six months. The window pops open first in January, way down in southern Florida. It moves ponderously north in a band that looks something like the jet stream—extending east to west, bending north over here and back south over there, undulating slowly as it progresses to places like Santee-Cooper and Sam Rayburn in February, John Kerr Reservoir in early March, Kentucky Lake in early April, finally reaching Canada and the northernmost borders of the crappie world by June. Along the way, you’ll see contrasts in methods, how anglers approach crappies, and how key depths and structures change, from lake to lake, while fishing the same, basic In-Fisherman calendar window throughout the natural range of the crappie.