Crappie are a blast on ultralight gear. Greer uses 12-pound fluorocarbon line with 10-pound monofilament leader. He attaches the jig with a loop knot, and his Flash Fin jigs are balanced so they will hang in the horizontal position from the loop. Drop the lure to the bottom, raise it one or two cranks, and slowly bounce it up and down. Bites will be very subtle, so watch for the slightest dip of the rod tip or movement of the line.

At lakes with lots of docks, like Cedar Creek, Marshall favors ultralight gear. “Shooting docks is awesome,” he said. “Use a 4-foot rod and get in close. Hold the lure with your thumb and index finger and shoot it back into spots you’d think you could never get a lure into.

“Beware if you are fishing Lake Fork this way: A big bass will slam a crappie on your line in a New York minute. I’ve landed several 10-pound bass on 6-pound test while shooting docks for crappie.”

Paty is such a strong believer in fishing docks on Cedar Creek that he routinely teaches the technique to clients. He uses high-visibility yellow line so that he can see any movement or change in depth of the line.

“A lot of times the line just goes dead rather than moves,” he noted. “The fish comes up behind the lure, takes it into its mouth, and just sits there. I’ve raised crappie in aquariums, and they are very curious fish. If you introduce something new into the tank, they will go over and take hold of it to see what it is. That’s why you will often catch more crappie with jigs than with minnows. They already know what a minnow is.”

THE CRAPPIE CONUNDRUM
Both black and white crappie are native to Texas, and constitute a very popular fishery, yet not many folks know more than little about them. Craig Bonds, a district fisheries biologist with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, has learned quite a bit about the fish through his telemetric studies of their movements. What he’s learned can help you target the times and places to fish for crappie.

Bonds has discovered that black crappie prefer clear water, and tend to associate with aquatic vegetation more than white crappie. White crappie seem to do better in turbid water, and around flooded timber or brush.

“That’s one reason you see black crappie dominate in East Texas, and see more white crappie in Central and West Texas,” he said. “During the day, white crappie associate with some kind of structure, usually brushpiles, docks, or timber. During the night they move around a lot.”

One of the puzzles about crappie is that a lake can be alive with them one year, and seemingly devoid of them a year or two later. Bonds uncovered some clues as to why this might be so. “In the northern United States, crappie tend to grow more slowly and live longer than they do in Texas,” he explained. “A crappie’s life span may be 4 to 6 years in Texas. It usually takes them 2 to 3 years to reach 10 inches, the minimum legal length on most Texas lakes.”