The Transition From Spring To Summer

Zooplankton are at the base of the food chain and critical to panfish. Find dense veils of them and panfish won’t be far away.

The postspawn transition is one of the trickiest moves crappies pull all year (except for the times, of course, when they just refuse to bite). During the Postspawn Period, plan to do lots of searching—first with maps, then with sonar. If you know where crappies spawn, and you know where they can be caught in summer, finding them during the transition can be as easy as using a straightedge on a map between those two points (but rarely is). Drawing as straight a line as landforms will allow, search the first drop-offs into main or secondary basins that you come to, following the line away from spawning habitat. This, at the very least, is a good area to begin searching with sonar.

On new or unfamiliar lakes, choose a general area that includes spawning habitat, extensive shallow flats (early-season food production) and confined open water. Idle in a serpentine pattern over the breaks, scanning for cover and schools of fish. Crappies often suspend off breaks in classic “Christmas-tree” patterns, scattered vertically from 5 or 10 feet under the surface down to 15 or 20 feet. Crappies tend to be most visible with sonar during the middle of the day, when they hold deepest and farthest from the break. Once a school is located in a transition area, count on them using it for several weeks in most cases—or as long as prey is available. General patterns may hold until turnover in fall, or when vegetation begins to decay.

In other words, you already may have a found a “summer” area.

Summer

Some lakes maintain more patterns than others, due to variations in size, depth, and complexity between waters. In most lakes, crappies scatter into a variety of patterns. A lot of folks give up on crappies during summer, for this and other reasons. Down South, many anglers feel the weather is just too hot to get out. Some say warm-water crappies don’t provide good tablefare. A number wait for the cooler waters of fall, thinking crappies will concentrate more. That can be a logical error in many lakes, as crappies will set up and become more predictable and more concentrated during summer than in spring or fall. Fishing at night provides another option for Southern anglers. And, hopefully, filling the freezer isn’t everybody’s only reason to go fishing for crappies.

As crappies spawn most prolifically after surface temperatures reach the 70°F to 75°F range, then spend several weeks in transition, true summer patterns often won’t set up until main-lake surface temperatures have broached 80°F. Surface temperatures, however, have little to do with the establishment of summer patterns. It’s more about timing. If you know when crappies spawned, count on most summer patterns beginning to appear within 2 to 3 weeks afterward.

Weedlines

One of the first to establish is the weedline pattern. Many of the crappies that begin the summer on weedlines may disperse into a variety of other patterns as the season progresses, depending on the complexity of the lake and the availability of other patterns.

The weedline pattern tends to be cyclic and involves elements of other patterns. During the transition, the cyclic nature of the crappie’s daily activities begins to come to light. During the day, crappies tend to move out, away from the weedline, to suspend in confined open water or to hold on or above slightly deeper structure, like a rockpile in 20 feet of water. As light intensity decreases during evening, crappies often move up to the deep weededge. As light levels continue to decrease, crappies may move into cups and pockets in the weedbed, the most active fish cruising through the very top of the vegetation. During the night these fish may move quite shallow, into and around the heaviest and densest weeds, where they are sometimes difficult to approach or catch.

At daybreak or sometime prior, the cycle begins to reverse itself. Good catches can be made along deep weededges in the early hours, but the bite typically slows as light intensity increases. By mid-morning, the fish might be found suspended 5 to 15 feet down over 20- to 30-foot depths, depending on wave action and water clarity. And, if structural elements exist like the rockpile mentioned above, crappies may position on the shaded side during the brightest hours of the day. By late afternoon, they begin to rise again.

Like most fish, crappies reach their metabolic peak in summer when the water is warmest, meaning they need to ingest more food per day than during other parts of the year to keep up with their increasing energy expenditures. So, crappies can be active and fishable during all phases of these daily cycles. Of course, the best techniques to employ might change every few hours or so. Pitching jig-plastic combos or small lures and swimming them horizontally along the weedline tends to excel early and late in the day, while jigging vertically with bait might score best during the middle of the day.

Weeds and the rich, organic substrates they grow in harbor lots of life. From weed-clinging epiphytes such as scuds or grass shrimp to burrowing mayfly nymphs to rich fields of plankton, baitfish find a smorgasbord of forage items in and around weedbeds. Each plant and substrate type nurtures a unique community of insect larvae and invertebrates. If shad, shiner, and chub populations die back later in summer, crappies can easily transit to a diet of invertebrates along a healthy weedline. So, logically, the best weededges are diverse. Where various substrate types and disparate weed varieties all come together in one area, and where the weeds are thick and healthy, baitfish and crappies find the most diverse and heavily populated supply of invertebrate forage.