Spring Ritual: Spawning Crappies

Spring Ritual: Spawning Crappies

By Rod Woten

Spring is finally in the air! Ice has finally decided to release its grip on our lakes, the sun is starting to feel warmer, and the days are getting longer. Surely gobbling turkeys and popping morels can’t be too far behind? Ever since becoming a fly fishing guide, it also means that I am going to start spending a lot of time on the trout streams of northeast Iowa. I love my time on the trout streams, there’s no denying that, but there is an annual event that happens about this time every year that makes me forego the trout for a weekend or two and make a beeline for my favorite crappie lake. This event, of course, is the annual crappie spawn! I fell pretty safe in saying that there is a large population of Iowa anglers that looks forward to the coming of the crappie spawn like a child looks forward to the coming of Christmas. During this time it’s relatively easy to bring home a “mess” of fish for supper. Anglers also have a legitimate shot at catching a trophy crappie since all the large egg-bearing females will be concentrated in shallow water and working up a powerful hunger. The crappie spawn is also a chance for the shore bound angler to have an even chance at catching as many fish as those fishing from a boat.

There are lots of theories as to when crappies will begin to spawn and range from “when the dogwoods bloom” to, “right around Mother’s Day” to “when the water is exactly 60 degrees”. While it’s hard to say that I’ve always seen the crappie spawn to coincide with Mom’s Day or the Dogwood bloom, I can say without a doubt that crappie moving into shallow water to spawn always correlates to warming water temperatures. Truthfully, the water has been warming since the end of the late ice period, but once the ice comes off, warming begins in earnest. Shallow areas, due to their lower volume of water to warm (relative to the main body of the lake) and dark bottoms that reflect and intensify the suns solar energy are obviously the first areas that will approach that magical 60 degree mark. Often the crappies won’t even wait until 60 degrees. It’s not at all uncommon to find many of the smaller male crappies moving into these shallow water spawning grounds ahead of the larger females when water temperatures are still in the mid 50’s. That is often my gauge as to exactly what stage the spawn is at. If all we seem to catch is smaller males, then I know the best is yet to come. Often those females are staged somewhere between the main lake basin and that shallow area in a transition area until the temperature is more to their liking. I know, once we start catching those larger females, that it’s go time!

This all should give you a really good idea where to start looking to find spawning crappies. Any shallow bay with a dark bottom will warm very quickly once the ice goes out. A bay or cove that has woody or weedy cover will be even better. The years when the spawn coincides with high water can be especially good as crappies will tend to move into the newly flooded brush and grass in droves. Is it any wonder that high water years often result in excellent year classes down the road? Sometimes this water can be as deep as 10, 12 or 15 feet, and sometimes it can be as shallow as 1 foot or less. I’ve actually seen spawning crappies in water so shallow that their dorsal fins were exposed, like some sort of speckled shark! The stained water often associated with high water is also helpful, because it helps to keep these shallow crappies from spotting you as you sneak in on them.

The hardest part of this whole technique is timing it so that you are on the water when the spawn is happening, and finding the shallow warm water that the fish are flocking to. Once that has been accomplished, they really are pretty easy to catch. I think that’s one of the main reasons that everyone is so excited to catch crappies during this period; these fish are in such a feeding frenzy that they are going to attack almost anything you drop in front of their noses.

One of my favorite techniques is to place a small fixed float about six inches to a foot above a small jig. Simply cast out and work the float back to you, much like you would work a topwater plug for bass. Either a slow steady retrieve or a short retrieve followed by a pause repeated all the way back as you reel in. Experiment until you find the exact speed and noise level that the fish are looking for on that day. More often than not they like the jerkier retrieve and lots of splashing and gurgling at the float. It can be very exciting watching that float in anticipation of the next strike, and very often that float will disappear in a violent manner.

This obviously is not the only way to catch these spawning crappies. Small crankbaits or spinners retrieved through their spawning areas will work too, as well as pitching jigs and jigging them back or swimming them back to you. The small jig beneath a float is by far my favorite method.However, if you’re a fly rod geek, like me, the spring crappie spawn is also a great time to break out your favorite fly rod. The fish are close in and shallow, which is the perfect situation for a fly caster. I usually start out with a foam hopper of panfish popper on the surface. If that doesn’t get their attention, I’ll switch over to a small streamer like a Wooly Bugger. A small nymph below a foam hopper of a strike indicator is also a good bet. Regardless of which fly you tie, simply fan cast and strip the line back until you detect a strike.

While the spring crappie spawn is a great time to catch lots of fish, it is also a time that we can do serious damage to the fishery. At no time during the year are crappies more vulnerable than they are during the spawn. They’re easy to pinpoint, and will attack almost anything that you drop in front of them. It is because of this that practices like selective harvest and catch and release are as important as they will be the entire rest of the season. The thing that anglers often forget is that the reason these fish are located where they are and behaving as they do is because they are spawning; creating the next generation of crappies that will eventually dominate the lake. If we take all of these fish out of the lake before they can spawn, the future quality of the crappie fishery will suffer.

My best advice is to immediately release any female you catch that is still carrying eggs. These females are also usually bigger than the males, so it’s a good idea to keep those genetics in the lake even after they have deposited their eggs. Instead, target the medium sized crappies for harvest. A male can fertilize the eggs of many different female crappies, but if the egg-carrying females are harvested, it really doesn’t matter how many males are left in the lake because there won’t be any eggs to fertilize. Going beyond that, it’s always a good idea to release the largest fish, and keep the medium sized ones for the table. As tempting as it is to keep those bigger fish, it’s those exact genetics that we want to keep in the lake and in play. No one likes catching small fish, but if all the genetically-gifted larger fish are removed from the lake, the only ones left to spawn the next generation will be less genetically-gifted, and less desirable, small fish.

The crappies spawn in Iowa can be an exciting time to catch crappies. So much so, that in some Iowa households, it qualifies as a local holiday. You can get up close and personal and catch them in water so shallow that you’d swear it can’t hold fish. These fish are easily accessed, stacked up and very hungry, so it’s a great time to catch lots of crappies as well. The trickiest part of the whole equation can be figuring out exactly when the spawn is going to happen, and not missing that window of opportunity, which is only open a very short time during some years. Just to be safe, be sure to keep your eye on the water temperatures….when the Dogwoods are blooming…right around Mother’s Day.