A list of the most consistent and prolific big-crappie waters in America over the past 3 or 4 decades has to include Toledo Bend in Texas and Santee-Cooper in South Carolina. But for most waters, trophy potential changes with conditions, predator counts, water levels, variability in recruitment, and other factors. So, the list changes as the trophy potential of most lakes around the continent tends to wax and wane year by year. Lakes identified on our map not only provide the best shot at a bevy of 2-pounders (possibly a 3), but have also been the most consistently productive over time.

The Final Word on Crappie Location

To know the latitude of a lake, the lake type, a little about the forage base, the cover options, and prevailing water conditions is to know something about crappie behavior there, without ever having to visit. Knowing all those things and a lot more, however, won’t deliver you to crappie nirvana every day on the water. Weather, changes in the forage base, a sudden abundance of insects, water temperature, a gradual change in water clarity, and a variety of other factors can impact location on a daily or even an hourly basis. At the end of a long list of factors that can be measured come those that cannot. Like hunches: At the end of a long day of searching, a hunch often plays a bigger role than any of us might like to admit, but there it is. Very few if any among us can say we’ve never been stumped by those specs, those calicos, those papermouth slabs.

We’ve all been amazed to find crappies in 5 feet of water when they were supposed to be deep, and vice-versa. And we’ve all been stumped by crappies suspending over deep water when conventional wisdom demands the use of dense cover. When hunches begin to deliver results more often than not in these situations, we start calling them informed guesses. Arriving at the lake with confidence only to be handed a day-long puzzle is a challenge we all face from time to time. And few things in angling are more satisfying than following a hunch that finally solves the puzzle. A foundation of knowledge can transform your hunches into something more, and that’s what this book is all about.

Research leads to waters that produce the best numbers, the biggest fish, or sometimes both. Look at the lake on a map: An instant understanding of the lake type and how crappies commonly relate to features found in such lakes pops up on your mental monitor. The process has begun. What follows is a pretty fun ride, because it means involving ourselves directly in the web of life surrounding the crappie. To understand crappies to the fullest possible extent requires knowledge of shad and shiners, muskies and bass, insects and plankton, watershed dynamics, weather, dissolved oxygen counts, and a lot more. Everything is connected.

Living things are never simple. A crappie has a brain the size of a pea, yes. But that brain is infinitely more complex than our most advanced computer. When your laptop can wander off, somehow avoid being stolen or run over by a truck, identify an outlet, plug itself in for recharge then travel miles to find its own way back home, we might accept arguments to the contrary. Until then, being outwitted by a crappie is no reason to hang your head. The more we know, the more we realize we don’t know. Life continues to adapt and evolve. Crappies too, so the ride can’t end here. The next Critical Concepts book on crappies revolves around presentation, which can also be used to locate fish. Lures and presentation options that cover water fast, triggering crappies with speed or appeals to curiosity, are the next steps in the fine-tuning process.

And so it goes. In other words, the final word on crappie location will never be printed, until crappies (or humans) cease to exist. As Albert Einstein noted, “The only really valuable thing is intuition."