Anglers still active despite fall weather

Saturday, October 24, 2009

Although hunting is taking over the outdoor spotlight, fishermen are also active. During the fall, many anglers welcome diversions such as the baseball playoffs and World Series, high school, college and professional football and other sports. However, fishermen need more than a good football game to keep them indoors in autumn, they need to be fishing.

With temperatures in the 70s this week, I had to go crappie fishing. I picked up my daughter and headed for Stockton Lake. After a couple hours of fishing, we had caught a dozen crappie and a walleye while enjoying the nice October weather, unlike the 50s of the weekend.

Many crappie anglers have found fall fishing for slab crappie can be very good once they learn how to pinpoint the fish during this transition time. The two keys to catching fall crappie are determining the depth where the active crappie hold and finding active fish.

Suspended crappie usually are inactive and nearly impossible to catch, so you need to focus your efforts on breaklines, areas where shallow water drops off fast into deep water. Food, available light and cover dictate where the fall crappie hold. Food in the magnet that draws the fish to a region while light and cover dictate the depth the fish prefer.

On most of the big lakes in Missouri and Kansas, threadfin shad spawn in late summer or early fall. The spawning grounds are usually coves off the main lake. These small baitfish in coves comes at a time when the spring spawning shad are to large for crappie to eat so these new fish draw the crappie into the coves like a magnet.

Crappie move up and down the water column depending on the available light. On cloudy days or when the water is off color, look for the crappie in shallow water, but when the sun is bright or the water is very clear, check out deeper water.

To find where the fish are holding, check your graph for Suspended fish. These fish aren't the ones that will be hitting, but it will tell you what depth on the breaklines the fish will be and they are the fish that should be hitting.

The final key is pinpointing crappie in the fall is cover.

Where there is no cover the fishing will not be good. Cover, like brush or stumps at the same depth as the fish usually produces some good fishing.

Jack Crawford and Jim Clark, hit the lake this week and after finding some brush and losing several jigs, they found the crappie 15 feet deep and finished the day with 20 crappie and said they would be back soon.

Since fall is a transitional period and the crappie do move up and down a lot you may need to modify your techniques to match the conditions present.Some productive methods include vertical jigging and casting jigs. If crappie are positioned on a bunch of stumps in 20 feet of water, vertical jigging would be the best choice.

Using balanced gear will help catch crappie in the fall. heavy line on stiff rods with jigs will work against you. Heavy line causes the jigs to fall too fast and a heave rod hampers your ability to feel subtle hits. I have watched dock anglers using heavy line and catfish rods get strikes, but not ever know it.

The most productive lure for fall crappie are small jigs. They fall slowly through the water and look more natural. Veteran crappie anglers know that lightweight-matched gear is the way to go for fall crappie.

If you don't want to start off the winter without crappie in the freezer, use the right methods to catch slab crappie. October is growing in popularity as a good month to go crappie fishing as crappie anglers bring in nice strings of fish.

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