LAKE PROCTOR
Lake Proctor is a top spot for anglers seeking crappie south of the Metroplex region. It probably holds one of the healthiest populations in the state, according to Texas Parks and Wildlife Department surveys. Shad are the key to crappie success, and this small reservoir is loaded with them.

Anglers should stick to live shiners to produce crappie, and target areas on the upper end of the lake along and above the bridge in the creek channel. The bridge itself has a good number of constructed brushpiles that hold huge numbers of crappie attracted by the cottonseed cake that anglers use to bait them.

Just as with the bass fishing in the region, another good area is the point at the north end of the dam. This heats up in the spring, as does the Sowell Creek channel around the bridge.

Using electronics to locate these fish is very important, as that can help put you on schools of fish that you might never find simply by fishing territory that looks good from the surface. Look for big schools of shad suspended over brush; find them, and you're likely to be on your way to locating solid crappie here.

GRANGER LAKE
Located northeast of Austin in Williamson County, this often-overlooked reservoir offers some excellent action for crappie.

According to Texas Parks and Wildlife Department officials, crappie fishing is at its best in the spring. The agency's profile of the water body says that anglers should concentrate their efforts near flooded trees and laydowns, which can be found in abundance in the creeks and upper end of the reservoir. During the summer, concentrate on main-lake humps, ridges, and dropoffs that have brush, most of which will have been placed there by anglers.

Good electronics will be necessary to find this structure. For fish that are actively biting, it is hard to beat a 1/16- to 1/8-ounce tube jig. Small or medium minnows are always a good bet, and can produce a stringer when little else works.

As on most other reservoirs, keep your eyes out for submerged brush by watching your electronics or simply looking for marker buoys slightly submerged under the lake's frequently turbid water. Target those buoys instead of ones you see floating, since most veteran crappie anglers never allow their marker buoys to reach all the way to the surface.

SAM RAYBURN
Rayburn Lake guide Roger Bacon put down the trolling motor on his bass boat, pointed at a marker buoy and told me to cast right to it; I should, he predicted, get a hit.

And he was right. No more than five seconds after the tiny jig hit the water, a big slab-sized crappie engulfed it. Soon, my father, who had accompanied me on the trip, had a fish on, and then Bacon did too. The way things looked, we were about to hit crappie pay dirt in a big way.

On that trip, I got a chance to fish with Bacon after weeks of threatening to go after crappie. He told me that he was on some crappie, but he left the good part for me to find out for myself: He was on some huge crappie, and lots of them.

By the end of the day, we conservatively estimated our catch at more than 80 crappie, most of which were keeper-sized fish. Moreover, we'd caught several that weighed well over 2 pounds. Those were legitimate trophy crappie in my book!

"That type of catch has been pretty commonplace for anglers who know where some of the main-lake brush is," said Bacon. "This time of year it's tempting to run shallow to find fish, and you probably can, but we're catching the biggest and the most in deeper water."

The first spot we fished was right in the middle of the lake, in an area that Bacon calls "the hard spot" --"because it's hard to find and hard to fish," he explained.