Crappies were born to be eaten.
They look like wimps and beg for the casserole dish.
You don't set a hook in a crappie like he was a billfish or you'll rip his lips off. He/she has lips as tender as those of the Playmate of the Month. A gentle lift and then a couple of seconds of half-hearted thrashing and Br'er Crappie comes meekly to gaff, mutely begging for the filet knife.
If it weren't for food value, a crappie wouldn't be as cherished a fish as it is. To put it charitably, the fight of a crappie is like being hit by a little girl's purse.
Regardless of His Royal Sissyness, a crappie gives way to no one when it shoulders its way into your entree plans. Just behind what would be a brain if a crappie had one are two of the most edible shoulders in all of fishdom.
There are two crappie species, white and black, distinguished by six dorsal fin spines for the white and seven or eight for the black. Black crappie are clearwater fish; white crappie tolerate murky waters. No one other than the incurably curious, fisheries biologists, or those who like to bore people at parties with fish trivia really cares whether he has caught a white or black crappie. What he cares about is the location of the nearest frying pan.
Crappies are sunfish, in the same family as bluegills, but that's about like saying Arnold Schwartzenegger and Pee Wee Herman both are in the Family of Man.
If fish talked, bluegills would growl, "I'm gonna punch out yer lights!" but crappies would whine, "Ow! Leggo, you brute or I'll hit you with my purse!"
For something that is, as my country kin used to say, as measly as a crappie, the damn things are incredibly hardy. Pull a crappie out of the water and it gives you a pouty look of reproach and dies almost instantly. Constitution of a mayfly.
Yet crappie range north into Canada and south to the Gulf. They survive cold and heat and even low oxygen conditions. A crappie biologist told me of a lake that had been drawn down to kill vegetation. Spring was dry and the lake went into mid-summer with almost no water and quickly lost oxygen. "The crappie were about the last to go," he said. Maybe they're gars in drag?
But before you can cook him, you have to catch Mr. Sac-a- Lait, which is what the Cajuns call crappie.
Cajuns are a species unto themselves, a tribe of French refugees from Arcadia who wound up in south Louisiana wondering why everyone said, "Y'all" rather than "Vous uns." So, they shrugged their Gallic shoulders, said, "Laissez les bontemps roullez" and went crappie fishing.
A Cajun acquaintance once confronted veddy, veddy English fish-and-chips. He regarded this foreign food for a moment, tasted it tentatively, then exclaimed, "Hayull, dis ain't nuttin but sac-a'-lait an' taters."
"Sac-a'-lait" roughly translated means "sack of milk" and my spy in Cajunland, a certified Cajun himself, says there are two stories: one, that the texture of the skin and meat looks like a sack of milk (yuck!); the other that the wimp fight of a crappie is soon over and you drag him in like a sack of milk. Please!
Most wimpfish are caught in the spring spawning period. Crappie move into shallow water from April through June, depending on the part of the country you live in, and when water temperature is 55 to 70 degrees. Find brushy areas, probably in protected coves, with fine gravel or light vegetation on the bottom.
Spawning depth varies with water clarity (less turbidity, deeper spawning). To find the right fishing depth, lower a white lure until it is barely visible. Measure the depth and fish up to twice that depth.
Fish to shore and if you're catching males, fish the other side of the boat (or farther out if you're casting from shore) and you should pick up females in deeper water, but at the same depth. It's an old trick, but mostly forgotten. Use droppers to attach a second (or even third) hook to your line. If you're prospecting for just the right lure or bait, you can try two at once and then switch to the one that is working. It's possible to hook a couple of crappies at the same time, which means you get the hustle of one reasonably good fighting fish.
About half a crappie's diet is small fish, so any lure that imitates a small fish is a crappie lure--and the jig imitates not only small fish, but various aquatic insects and crayfish as well. The deadliest artificial lure I've found is a 1/64-ounce white chenille bodied jig, with a maribou tail and a lead head of shocking pink. It looks like something tied to imitate Dolly Parton, but it will outfish other jigs side-by-side nearly every time.
So you wonder why, if crappie like minnows, do they go silly over a pink jig that looks about as much like a minnow as I look like Barbara Bush.
But that's the way life is.
The nice thing about jigs is that they catch everything. A Missouri angler once caught a state record muskellunge on a crappie jig. He had to send his wife to town to buy a net large enough to land the monster. Sure messed up a good crappie fishing trip. If you're not into hot pink, go with a yellow jig in clear water, a white one in murky water. Buy them by the dozen because you'll lose them in the brush. Sometimes when I'm casting jigs, I set the hook in a channel catfish, and walleyes are fond of swallowing crappie minnows, thus creating consternation.
In summer, crappie hang around bridge pilings, usually 10-15 feet deep. Cast beyond the piling and let the jig drift past the fish or fasten a bobber and let wave action tickle the jig (or minnow). Summer fishing is tough, but an old trick is to find a brushy area and fish at night, by the light of a lantern.
Hang the lantern away from the boat (on a pole or perhaps on a tree limb), back off and fish with minnows in the cone of light. The light attracts insects which attract minnows...which attract crappies.
If you're catching small crappies within a few feet of the surface, trying going deeper, say 10-15 feet, and see if you don't start catching larger fish.
Crappie are attracted to brush and anglers often build brush piles by sinking Christmas trees wired together and anchored with a concrete block. They'll last a long time. Resort owners sometimes create such holes and offer winter fishing (where it doesn't freeze) in an enclosed, heated dock.
You also can catch crappie through the ice along drop-offs. There are a half-dozen ways to catch crappie; a jillion to locate them. The secret is to find the fish. Steve Wunderle got together more information on crappie than you can use in a lifetime in his little book New Techniques That Catch More Crappie (Outdoor Books, 86 Eight Mile Prairie Road, Carterville, IL 62918).
Crappie are like the Chinese army--knock one down, two spring up in its place. My friend Dave Mackey fishes a country club lake (in rural north Missouri, country clubs are located next to a railroad track and behind a feed mill). He has the Quixotic idea that he can solve an overpopulation of crappie by fishing faster than they procreate.
He's wrong, but every spring we catch crappie by the bucket-load and if anyone ever recommended poisoning out that lake to start over, I would shoot him dead. I am quite happy with many small filets as opposed to a few large ones. We're talking food here, not catch-and-release trophy water.
Missouri has a 10-inch minimum length limit on crappies on an arm of one lake. It makes for fewer crappies in the creel, but bigger ones. It also gives the fish a chance to spawn before it trips over a jig. A 10-inch crappie is about a half-pound fish and is about four years old. There are three-pound crappies.
A three-pound crappie looks like something that escaped from Stephen King's aquarium. The International Game Fish Association world record for black crappie is four pounds, eight ounces, caught in 1981 in Kerr Lake, VA, by L. Carl Herring. The white crappie record is five pounds, three ounces, caught by Fred Bright at Enid Dam, MS, in 1957. But the National Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame recognizes a whopping six- pound black crappie, caught by Lettie Robertson in Louisiana's Westwego Canal in 1969.
Like all creatures, great and small, crappies have Latin names. Biologists like to talk about wild creatures in a language that has been dead for a thousand years, which makes you wonder about biologists. But not much.
Anyway, most Latin names are as ugly as 40 miles of bad road ("I think I'll catch Lepomis gibbosus." "Oh, my God! I hope they can cure it!")
But crappie Latin is as pretty as a Spanish love song, even though faintly ominous. The white crappie is Pomoxis annularis which sounds a little like a disease of cattle, but the black crappie is Pomoxis nigromaculatus which, if you say it three times fast, turn around and click your heels, will take you right out of Kansas and into God-knows-where.
In my home, Missouri, there is only one local name for crappie--"crappie" and it is pronounced "croppie," not "crappie." And most of us use a collective singular: "crappie" for one or a bunch, not "crappies."
Except for those who don't. "I'm gonna catch a mess of crappies," says the guy who wouldn't dream of saying, "I'm gonna catch a mess of basses."
But other people have more local names for crappie than Carter does peanuts. Sac-a'-lait is only one. "Calico bass" is a favored black crappie alias, while grass bass, speckled bass, speckled perch, specks, papermouth, tinmouth, bachelor, newlight, strawberry bass, suckley perch, chinquapin perch, Campbellite, and lamplighter are some others applied to both white and black crappie.
So, it appears that no one knows what to call a crappie (as opposed to a muskellunge, for example, which universally is known as, "You rotten, no good S.O.B." after it has just broken your line and your heart).
But all anglers know what to do with the beached crappie, flopping feebly on the sand. He is two chunks of Heaven, just waiting to dress up in a body stocking of batter and go swimming in a pool of bubbling oil.
Carefully pat your filets dry, then dip in a mixture of egg and beer, then shake in a bag containing Cajun seasoning (there are many--keep trying until you find one to your taste), corn meal, and flour. The proportions are to your taste, but I like a rich coating of the Cajun stuff.
Drop the coated filet in very hot oil and cook for about two minutes, maybe less. Remove and drain.
Dig in. After all, crappie were created to be eaten.
Copyright (c) 1996 Joel M. Vance. All rights reserved.
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