Transition to Summer

On the way out of spawning areas, back toward the main lake, crappies move across flats and tend to hold on or near the first major drop-off they come across. Water flowing out of the spawning area (bay, channel, creek, or pond) often holds higher plankton counts than the main lake, attracting hordes of shiners, shad, chubs, and other minnows. Adjacent cover in the form of newly emerging cabbage, deep bulrushes, stumps, or brushpiles attracts large groups of crappies and holds them for a time, before they eventually filter off to summer habitat. But there is no universal manner in which crappies behave at any time of year. Much depends on lake type, water clarity, latitude, primary forage options, and a host of other factors.

Studies suggest that, during spring and through the spawning period, crappies increase their activity during the day, peaking at dusk, then become less active at night. After the spawn, however, crappies that have moved from spawning sites into confined open water feed heavily after dark. On both murky and clear South Dakota natural lakes studied by Dr. Chris Guy at South Dakota State University, using radio telemetry, he recorded substantial movements of crappies beginning at dusk and lasting through the night. During the day, they were less active, but moved closer to shallow cover at dusk and remained there until dawn.

“After the spawning period, the crappies we tracked in two lakes didn’t move nearly as much,” Guy said. “Black crappies in a clear natural lake shifted into deeper water after the spawn, though most remained at the same end of the 1,000-acre lake. In the rather murky impoundment, where we studied white crappies, some moved off shore while others remained in shallow cover. The differences may have been due more to environmental conditions than to differences between the species.”

Postspawn crappies in natural lakes switch rather swiftly from shallow cover to “nowhere land,” and all the popular spots suddenly fall flat. Many anglers lose track of transition crappies in lakes they fish because of the diurnal shift described above. Crappies that fed during the day and during low-light periods all through spring may suddenly begin feeding almost exclusively at night in waters considered clear, off-clear, or of average visibility.

Even in water considered cloudy, the night bite can be exceptional during the transition from Postspawn to summer. Crappie fishermen along the Georgia-Alabama border have long known this to be true in West Point Lake on the Chattahoochee River, where the water is far from clear and secchi disks are visible only down to 3 feet or less. During the May crappie run there, a brightly lit flotilla of boats can be seen every night from the Route 219 Bridge. Anglers arrive in droves every evening and anchor along the edge of submerged creek channels with brush, waiting for crappies to go on their nightly feeding binge. In almost all environments, nocturnal crappies move shallower to feed at night. This schedule can persist into early summer and, in some cases, continues until the following spring.

West Point crappie enthusiasts used a variety of fishing lights both to see better and as fish attractors. During the day, small shad form tight schools offshore, feeding on plankton. After dark, shad schools disperse, generally moving shallower and toward the bank. Scattered formations, positioned along shallower edges, are far easier for crappies to intercept than the tight balls that form during the day, in open water with no barriers to stop them. At night in all environments, crappies often move into very shallow water in search of minnows that occupy open water during the day, or minnows that become much more vulnerable around cover at night. The crappie has the largest eyes (as a percentage of body size) of any North American freshwater fish, probably providing them an advantage over their prey in darkness. They are uniquely adapted to foraging at night.

As mentioned, crappies move out of the shallow spawning habitats of spring toward summer haunts. In most natural-lake environments, they suspend during the day in summer—shifting vertically from day to night, seeking shade, depth, or cover during the day and shallower, plankton-rich areas, foraging during low-light periods and at night.

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.

As weeds reach their zenith during early summer, look for areas where various types come together. For instance, healthy stands of cabbage, coontail, and curlyleaf pondweed all found in a relatively small area, bordered on the shallow side by a field of lily pads, might be a key spot. It’s a good place to start looking. Diverse weed types coming together tend to form lots of pockets and open areas that crappies (and anglers) can use to their advantage. Even cruising past a shoreline at high speed, it’s possible to spot some of these biologically diverse areas. If a homogeneous shoreline of all cattails, all bulrushes, or all maiden cane suddenly breaks into a diverse mix of all those types with scattered pad fields just beyond, it often pays to slow down and take a closer look at the deep weededge.

Another key element is the surrounding structure. Weedline crappies tend to prefer confined open water to true open water. One example of confined open water would be an expanse between two underwater points that are relatively close together, say 100 yards to a quarter mile. If each of these points harbors a healthy deep weedline, it would be hard to imagine crappies not using the area in a good lake for that species, if it’s not extremely deep between the two underwater points. Crappies typically prefer to have some “deep” options in the area, like brushpiles, rock humps, weed humps, or reefs. Having these elements rising out of 15- to 35-foot depths is far preferable to having them at 50 feet or deeper. Confined open water might be found between islands, between sunken humps, or in the middle of a large, structurally diverse bay.

Confined open water can be a pattern in itself, as some baitfish increasingly suspend out among the developing fields of plankton. Many open-water or entirely pelagic species of baitfish, like threadfin shad, emerald shiners, and ciscoes, suspend all summer to take advantage of this bounty. Eventually, in a variety of lake types, some crappies are drawn to this developing food chain far off-shore.

Open Water and Wind Patterns

Weedline patterns eventually lead to other patterns as the environment continues to blossom with life. As veils of plankton explode into thick, viscous green veils visible to the naked eye, some crappies and bluegills take to the open seas and can be found scattered over depths of 80 feet or deeper at times.

The tiniest forms of plankton are made up of plant life called phytoplankton. Larger specimens include animals called zooplankton. Even the largest zooplankton remain barely visible to the human eye, but not to the eyes of crappies or bluegills, which often feed on large zooplankters. Plankton of both varieties undertake vertical diurnal movements in the water column, moving up as the light intensity decreases late in the day, and moving deeper again as light levels increase the following morning. Open-water schools of crappies tend to hover just below the thickest accumulations of plankton—and just below feeding schools of baitfish. Depths that open-water crappies use depend on cloud cover, wave action, water clarity, and color and time of day, but it’s most typical to find active, suspending, open-water crappies within 2 to 15 feet of the surface. Less active fish tend to be deeper than 12 feet.

The primary key to locating an open-water panfish bite is wind direction. The second most valuable bit of information is wind history. Plankton can pile up along a shoreline where the wind is blowing in. The bite builds exponentially for every day the wind blows in that direction. Where it’s blowing into a thick, healthy weedline, nomadic fish following the wind can mix with resident fish that stay on that weedline all summer, creating a double whammy accumulation of crappies.

In glassy conditions, nomadic schools of baitfish and crappies can be located by various means. Bluegills often broach and porpoise, giving themselves away. Crappies more often dimple the surface. Look for any kind of surface activity, however. Wherever small minnows are jumping out of the water over depths of 30 feet or more, chances are good that feeding crappies are the cause. And, quite often, the thickest, greenest veils of plankton can be seen in the water during calmer spells. These areas can be quite productive. It’s not uncommon to find big schools of open-water crappies hovering high in the water column over 50- to 100-foot depths during long calm spells, though it’s more common to find them over depths of 20 to 40 feet in those portions of lakes or basins harboring extensive shallow flats. It can be difficult to locate schools with sonar when crappies cruise just beneath the surface, but areas where sonar indicates lots of baitfish should always be checked. These open-water areas can be covered by side trolling, drifting, or spider-rigging, while slowly trolling forward. Any tactic that keeps the boat easing along is more likely to intercept these roaming schools of fish that aren’t held to a specific area by any kind of physical structure.

For suspended crappies, water temperature can be a better guide to good fishing. Especially on large lakes, surface temperature can vary by 4 or 5 degrees from one area to the next. The warmest water tends to hold the most plankton (though that’s not always true), and the edges where colder masses of water meet warmer masses can create a plow effect, concentrating plankton and baitfish along the edge. In open water, several acres of the surface might read 74°F, while several adjacent acres might read 69°F. Using a surface-temperature gauge, look for that transition zone where the temperature begins to change and scout it for plankton veils, surface activity, and schools of baitfish.

When the wind changes direction often over a three- or four-day period, patterns can dissipate. Some crappies remain in open water but scatter to the point where it becomes difficult to locate fishable concentrations. Crappies may begin to concentrate on deeper structural items or on existing cover on those structural items, suggesting a switch to a different pattern.

Humps, Brushpiles, Rockpiles and Reefs

One of the most overlooked summer patterns for crappies in natural lakes involves deep cover, and this pattern has a lot to do with thermoclines. Natural lakes tend to set up thermoclines somewhere between early and mid-summer, depending on weather patterns. The thermocline is a transition zone between an upper layer of warmer, highly oxygenated water (epilimnion) and a lower layer of cooler, less-oxygenated water (hypolimnion). Thermoclines can establish as shallow as 8 feet down or can be pushed as deep as 100 feet or more (especially in very large bodies of water like the Great Lakes); but a more typical range for thermoclines is between 20 and 40 feet.

The thermocline is a band of water that typically extends 6 to 10 feet from top to bottom. Within that band, temperatures decline quickly from top to bottom. The epilimnion may read 74°F on the surface and the temperature may only drop 10°F, to 64°F, at 30 feet. But within the thermocline, temperatures can drop another 10°F in a span of only 10 feet—1°F per foot or, in some cases, even faster. Where thermoclines establish in a lake has to do with overall depth, natural currents, wind-driven currents, atmospheric pressure, mineral content of the water, and a host of other factors.

Thermoclines can be located by a variety of means. The most popular method for anglers involves the use of sonar. With the gain turned up on a good depth-finder, the water-density change within a thermocline can be detected as a band of gray or indeterminate color, or (on color monitors) as a distinct band of light green or blue well above the bottom reading in deep water. The thermocline can be pushed deeper on the windward side of a lake, and can rise toward the surface of the lee side of a lake during periods of extended and consistent wind patterns.

Areas where thermoclines intercept structure can be important spots for crappies in natural lakes during summer. Because of the lake’s low oxygen content, crappies can only descend beneath the thermocline for very short periods of time. This serves to concentrate fish just above the zone of rapid temperature change. Rockpiles, humps, reefs, brushpiles, fallen trees—and anything else crappies can use for cover—that extend above the thermocline become key areas, if the thermocline is shallower than 40 feet.

A rock- or brushpile on an otherwise featureless flat in 20- to 25-foot depths can become a prime summer haunt for crappies in natural lakes as well as reservoirs, especially when found in close proximity to diverse forms of shallow cover and structure crappies tend to use, like weedlines on points and shallow humps in areas with large shallow flats near an archipelago of islands or series of main-lake points. The best “deep” cover in natural lakes is rarely far from an extensive and diverse weedline or rocky shoreline with added cover (fallen trees, etc.) and rarely far from some example of confined open water.

Deep rockpiles, rock flats, and reefs can provide plenty of crayfish, insect larvae, and other forms of invertebrates for crappies to prey upon when baitfish numbers decline or recede temporarily to open water. One reason we refer so often to rockpiles is the documented preference crappies have for transition zones, where some soft substrates surround areas of rock or gravel. Just as areas where diverse soils and bottom types coming together can provide a greater mix of plant and invertebrate life, so, too, can the meeting of hard and soft bottom in deeper areas provide a wider variety of forage options. Transitions from soft to hard bottom can, in fact, be key areas for most species of fish living in natural lakes for the same reasons. Such areas consistently draw more baitfish over the course of time.

The intersection of the thermocline with these types of structure or cover can serve to concentrate crappies at a certain depth level, making them easier to locate vertically, in some cases. The “deep” bite on a rockpile or hump is often hottest during mid-morning and afternoon hours, and often dematerializes as the sun approaches the horizon later in the day. As light levels decrease, crappies tend to rise and suspend off nearby weedlines, fallen trees, rows of docks, and other forms of shallower cover. By sunset, they might move right into the weedline or fallen trees and concentrate along outside edges and branches, with some fish cruising over and among the wood or weeds.

As described in the segment on weedlines, this pattern often reverses at dawn, with crappies moving out to suspend off the breaks or over their deep cover before settling back down to rockpiles, humps, and deep reefs sometime around mid-morning.