Nationwide, more anglers pursue crappies during winter than summer. It has more to do with the perception that crappies are “mushy” and less fit for the table in summer than with any angling consideration. Crappies using open water in summer are more aggressive than they are in winter, and that’s true everywhere. Higher temperatures mean higher metabolic rates mean higher feeding frequencies, and that’s just how the cold-blooded roll.

Past articles detailing the effectiveness of small slashbaits (suspending jerkbaits) for summer crappies outlined tactics that continue to produce big catches. However, suspended crappies only rise more than 2 feet for slashbaits when highly active, highlighting the need to specifically target deeper layers of the water column.

A favorite tactic in my boat for suspended crappies involves 1/32- to 1/8-ounce jig-twistertail combos. Weight is selected by referring to the depths where crappies appear on sonar. When the highest crappies are 10 feet down, I might choose a 1/32-ounce head on calm days, a 1/16-ounce head on breezy days, and so on. I watch the jig fall beside the boat to determine how long it will take to reach 9 feet, pitch it out there 40 feet or so, count it down to 9 feet, then swim it so slowly it neither sinks nor rises much. Just point the rod tip down and reel very slowly. Don’t jig or twitch. Just reel.

The same method applies to swimbaits, but everything tends to move a bit faster—which is great. Summer crappies don’t move at all like winter crappies. In fact, swimbaits can become deep spinnerbait surrogates for gauging bites in a hurry.

Categories and Characteristics

Classic swimbaits have internal weights, usually in the form of some kind of jig, molded into soft plastic, like an enclosed jig-grub combo. Finesse swimbaits are all plastic, so you add the hook and weight, usually in the form of a jig. Micro swimbaits of both styles are being manufactured with thumper tails and with auger tails. But any plastic bait with a fish shape that looks like a grub could be called a swimbait, when the subject turns to crappies. These arbitrary categories are simple aids in communication.

The primary function of a swimbait is to swim (big surprise), which means to move more-or-less horizontally. However, vertically jigging with swimbaits can be very effective, if the bait is balanced for it. With classic swimbaits (weight molded in), look at the eye placement. If it’s vertical and above the head of the lure, coming out at a 90-degree angle, it might hang horizontally with the knot from your leader placed right on top of the eye, or with the knot pushed behind the eye. Finesse swimbaits on a balanced jig may operate vertically, but it depends on the weight distribution of the plastic itself.

Nit-picky details like these become critical when considering the versatility of swimbaits. They’re perfect tools for trolling, drifting, pitching, spider-rigging, and vertical-jigging under a variety of conditions. Consider spider-rigging. The primary plastic “alternative” for spider-rigging is the venerable tube. When using a tube, the spider-rigger is asking it to swim all day long. It’s used in conjunction with weight on the line in the form of split shot, egg sinkers, or some other alternative. The tube may be nodding, rising, and falling when the boat changes direction or speed, but that, too, is swimming. When asking plastics to swim, what better choice than a swimbait? It looks and acts more like a minnow, it requires no additional weight on the line, and the action tail provides more vibration to help crappies zero in on it. Tubes work better when using plastics with minnows, as color and size enhancers. Swimbaits might work better than tubes when livebait isn’t necessary, especially in stained or murky water.

Since the primary initiative of swimbait design is to swim, it should look natural doing it. A slight roll or wobble is fine, but the bait can’t spin or rise up on one side all the time. When trolling or drifting, pay attention to how much speed these baits can endure. Larger swimbaits with heavier weights tend to resist spinning out, giving the impression all swimbaits can be “burned,” but small swimbaits discussed here—from 1.5 to 3 inches in length—can be more delicately balanced. As a general rule, choose the smallest swimbaits in lakes that have pressured insect feeders, and use the largest 3-inch models only when slabs are feeding on shad of that size.

All classic swimbaits are not created equal. Take three out of the same package and two may run true at speed, while the third turns up on its side or spins out. This is because the weight is not perfectly centered, molded too close to one side or the other of the bait inside the plastic body. At slow speeds (drifting and spider-rigging) and when jigging, it may not make a difference. But when choosing a spinnerbait surrogate, something that triggers with speed and flash, you need to select carefully, looking for the baits with the best balance.

With finesse swimbaits, speed to burn arises from the choice of jig style and weight, and the ability to rig plastics straight. The hooks should run straight through the plastic, come out on the centerline or seam of the plastic, and the plastic can’t be bunched up. Bringing the hook out short is just as bad, because it forces the tail down at an angle.

In all tactics about to be discussed, balance is the key. To reach a desired depth and stay there at speeds crappies respond to requires some thought about line. Most classic swimbaits are heavy, in my opinion. In other words, if I were rigging the same plastic on my own choice of jig, I would typically choose a lighter head than the one embedded in the plastic. So the balance of these classics, in the 1.5- to 2.5-inch range, is weighted toward techniques that trigger with speed. But nobody can argue with the overall success of spider-rigging, and part of the reason for that success is slow, strictly controlled, horizontal motion. Most days on the water, when slab crappies are the target, a tube, grub, or swimbait is most successful when following that dictum: Maintain slow, steady, deliberate, horizontal motion.

Jigging, twitching, snapping, and burning plastics have a definite place for crappies. On the other hand, no professional crappie anglers would argue that crappies are as prone to making reaction strikes as a barracuda. For crappies, slow and steady wins the race in most conditions. To make a classic swimbait slow down, use heavier monofilament line. Braids, being thinner than mono, allow swimbaits to drop too quickly for crappies most of the time. While I prefer 2- and 4-pound test for finessing crappies, 6- and even 8-pound-test mono are better choices with most classic swimbaits, slowing both the drop and the swim a little more. Heavier line also allows you to pitch into heavier cover and rip through dense weeds without breaking off. The fact that classic swimbaits fish heavy and fast limits them to summer and fall for crappies on a horizontal plane, though properly balanced horizontal swimbaits with a 90-degree eye extending straight up sometimes become excellent vertical tools for winter fishing in deep water.

Choose finesse swimbaits when you want to slow down even further, because many of them balance well with a 1/32-ounce head. However, shad bodies with blunt ends meant to match up with a swimbait-style jighead won’t operate at all with a head too light to pull it down fast enough on the drop to make the tail thump. That’s the key to matching jigs to plastics of this type. The tail should work perfectly on the drop. If not, the head is too light.

Tactical Review

On a private lake known for porcine panfish, we caught crappies last summer with small swimbaits while jigging, trolling, pitching, and drifting. It didn’t matter what the boat was doing, or what the wind was doing with the boat. The lake was so full of crappies that we finally just sat down and dangled swimbaits 20 feet behind the boat and about 5 feet down while drifting across the middle of the basin, because that worked as well as everything else with half the effort.

Pitching, as always, was the most fun. Classic swimbaits in crappie sizes can be thrown with an ultralight rod, but a medium-light rod in the 7- to 7½-foot range tends to work better with lines testing at 6 pounds or heavier. Crappies were everywhere, so we started fishing over and alongside weededges and clumps, selecting a 1.5-inch Creme Spoiler Shad and a Stanley Wedge Tail. The Spoiler Shad is lighter and smaller than most classics, allowing us to swim it slowly, while the Wedge Tail could be balanced with whatever jig weight we needed to get the job done.

Pulling the lure through the water beside the boat at various speeds provides clues about the speed required to keep swimbaits moving horizontally during a retrieve. Retrieve too fast and the lure rises. Retrieve too slow and it sinks. The optimal retrieve does neither, maintaining a pretty steady relationship between the lure and the surface of the lake. In this case, crappies were too shallow to see on sonar.

Out off the weededges we watched the sonar, determined the depths crappies were using, and pitched larger 2-inch classics. We counted them down to the level of the fish, pointed the rod tip down, and began a slow, steady retrieve. Crappies eventually stopped responding to slow and steady, so we added a twitch or two along the way and caught a few more before we began trolling and drifting across the basin.

Trolling and spider-rigging for crappies are similar in terms of speed but different in lead lengths and the number of rods employed. In Minnesota we’re allowed only one rod per person. Spider-rigging poorly describes a boat with two “legs.” A spider needs at least 6 legs, and that’s two short of being anatomically correct. But trolling with swimbaits is a perfect way to cover a lot of water while looking for scattered pods of fish along weedlines, big flats, and large main-lake humps, and it gets the lures back behind the boar farther than spider-rigging, which is really only an advantage in very clear water.

Crappies aren’t built for speed. We can’t expect them to accelerate and maintain high speeds over any appreciable distance, so techniques like these need to be slowed down. That simple fact bonds all three boat-presentation techniques—trolling, spider-rigging, and drifting for crappies—to the trolling motor. Control drifting allows the wind to do most of the work, but the trolling motor is required for course corrections. Even when trolling, which is the fastest of these three techniques, I set the speed low and employ a stop-and-go approach most of the time.

Whatever speed you want to maintain, there’s a swimbait that will match it at the depth you want to cover. When crappies are pinned to bottom on humps or slopes below the weedline, slow down and allow classic baits to touch bottom every 5 feet or so. When it touches, lift it gently, then slowly lower the rod back to its original position. It’s almost vertical-jigging and it’s almost trolling. It’s related to a walleye technique called snapjigging, but with less vigor and speed. Some call it strolling. Whatever it is, it works, and it locates crappies relatively quickly when they can be tough to see on sonar.

We’ve written a lot, lately, about fishing plastics “in space” for smallmouth bass. The same technique works for suspended crappies with finesse swimbaits and light heads. Just pitch one out on a 1/64- to 1/16-ounce head, depending on the depths crappies seem to be using and slowly feed line until the bait is 80 to 100 feet behind the boat. Use the trolling motor to navigate around humps, across flats, along breaks, and along mudlines, keeping the pace under 2 mph most of the time, allowing the bait to slowly rise and fall on turns and during speed changes, but moving horizontally most of the time. Of course, where spider-rigging is allowed it produces more crappies in a shorter period of time, but fishing swimbaits in space puts the rod in your hands where you feel every strike. And it tends to work better than spider-rigging in very clear water.

The appearance of small, soft swimbaits in the 1- to 3-inch range appealed immediately to those who like to swim jigs for crappies. We already knew plastics with action tails worked, but these new units seemed sleeker, more natural, and effective even before removed from the package. Sometimes first impressions are right on the money.