SUMMER CRAPPIE

Summer Crappie
Finally summer has arrived. No more 'blue northers', no more barometric changes, no more mild-pleasant weather.....yes sir, 100 degrees in the shade. I know, unless you're from Texas, you think I'm nuts to anticipate the hotter weather, but with it comes some of the best crappie fishing of the year (but not "the" best...that's later). The crappie have completed all their love making and they're hungry and looking for a place to spend the summer's hotter water temps. After the spawn is complete, the crappie will start to migrate to the mid-depths (as dictated by your lake's depth) and look for standing timber, stump rows, brushpiles, creek channel drop-offs and the like. Once found, they are the most predictable that they will be all year long. If you found them 'there' today, they'll probably for sure be 'there' tomorrow. This is the time of year that you get to rid yourself of all those 'old' jigs that have been laying in your tackle box for so long....cause the brushpiles will surely give you good reason to visit your local tackle store as soon as you get home. My favorite way to fish the summer patterns, is to fish my jig vertically over the brushpiles, or vertically along side the standing timber. I'll use either 1/16 oz or 1/8 oz jig heads, depending on what the crappie tell me they want. My jig bodies will vary in size this time of the year from the 1 1/2" size to 4" size...again, dictated by what the crappie tell me. The key to fishing in the summer is S--L--O--W. When you think you're fishing slow enough...slow down some more. Less movement is best, and then when you do move it, just twitch it downward, not upward (too long to explain...just trust me). Two things that you must consider as "gotta do's"...you gotta use hi-viz line, and you gotta watch it all the time your jig is in the water. Why, because sometimes the crappie will knock your socks off when they hit it, but most times they'll just take the jig in and unweight your line (your line will go slack). If you can't see your line, or worse yet, if you're not watching, you'll never know that you missed catching the lake record. And while we're talking line, don't cheat yourself. I have known guys that hardly ever change line, saying that it cost too much, or guys that buy the cheapest line that they can find to save $.50. Think about it this way...what is the only thing that separates you from your fish??? I've figured it out, and it costs me approximately $.35 each to put new line on my reels, and I change every third day of fishing. But I digress. Bottomline, summer time is the easiest time of the year to figure out where the crappie are, as well as to catch them.