Natural Lakes

Each bay, cove, or segment of a large, sprawling lake functions as a single entity, offering plenty of opportunities for anglers to spread out and explore. The key is finding deeper water, especially in the Far North. In mesotrophic bays and lakes like these, crappies often choose to winter in basins or on flats between 40 and 50 feet deep. Find a variety of structural features (sunken islands, reefs, shallow flats, sharp drops, shoreline points, saddles between islands, etc.) associated with the deep hole or flat, and you’ve probably isolated a “crappie section.” Deep basins draw crappies in winter, and diverse structural features hold them through the remainder of the year.

Shiners, perch, young-of-the-year perch, and other forage-sized baitfish for crappies can be abundant in lakes of this type, allowing crappies to prey on minnows all year—an important consideration for anglers trying to determine what the fish might bite. In the smaller lakes discussed earlier, minnow forage can be thinned quickly, before midwinter in many instances, and anglers are better off switching to tiny jigs, plastics, and livebaits that imitate aquatic invertebrates. In fact, minnows don’t work as well in such lakes. Conversely, in the bays or lakes similar to Figure C, minnows and minnow imitations tend to produce best all winter long.

In lakes like this, crappies react in many different ways to winter—reactions as diverse as the environment they live in. The most typical reaction involves crappies suspending 4 to 12 feet or more off bottom much of the time. This is due, in part, to the larger populations of baitfish found here. The crappie’s entire energy source is no longer pinned to bottom. And it’s also likely that larger perch, sauger, walleyes, or possibly bass rule the bottom. Typically, when crappies suspend here, they can be found in confined open water adjacent to structure, especially main-lake and island points, sunken reefs, and saddles connecting two structures. Pelagic baitfish like shad, smelt, ciscoes, and emerald shiners, relating to open water most of the winter, become the primary source of food for crappies.

Crappies typically mill around in these expansive environments, even during winter. When the distance between structures is short, crappies generally swim slowly back and forth from one to the next. When the distance is large (say, a mile or more), they remain in the same general area between the structures all winter. It’s not unusual to locate them, catch a few, and suddenly find no fish visible on sonar. To stay on them, you have to keep moving. Crappies won’t move far or fast, but the tendency for them to circle the area they have defined as their winter home is almost universal during the cold months. And, as mentioned, these are some of the easiest crappies to locate with sonar in winter, because they tend to stay off bottom more of the time.

The Zooplankton Connection—In these large, deep, multi-structured environments, plankton also plays a key role in crappie location. No need for a science course, but it pays to remember several key points. Most importantly, crappies are well connected to the bottom of the food chain—by sunlight and plankton. They routinely gobble up quantities of zooplankton—and not just as fingerlings, but all through their lives. Though the human eye may not be able to see them, zooplankters remain visible to crappies throughout the plankton’s lifespan.