Catching suspending crappie is easy: Just drop a tandem rig baited with a couple of live minnows and tightline it at a depth that puts the bait among the fish. Use a relatively light drop-weight, from 1/4 to 1/2 ounce, and tie your first dropline about 14 inches above the weight; tie the second dropline about a foot above that. Let it sink to the bottom, take out the slack and then come up a few inches at a time until you find the "bite zone."

If you don't want to fool with tandem rigs, you can use a single line on a slip-cork. To improve your chances, use crappie jigs tipped with minnows, so if a fish steals your minnow, you can still catch fish on the bare jig.

A fisheries biologist in the Deep South once told me that, if the water temperature is right, crappie can spawn anytime from December to June. Late-winter/early-spring flooding also plays a huge role in the spawn. As big lowland reservoirs and rivers swell, they overflow into floodplains and backwaters, creating a wealth of crappie spawning habitat. Those areas are shallower than the main basins, so they warm up faster. If you've been targeting suspending fish, you'll notice they follow these floodwaters inland.

The trick is to time the peak of the rise. Crappie will move into an area and spawn near the high water within a few days of the peak, ensuring that their eggs can hatch, and that their young can move to deep water before the water falls and strands them in the shallows.

In the Deep South, these floodwaters can sprawl over many thousands of acres. When they fall, however, they'll drain out of the backwaters within about 10 days, leaving them and the fish trapped in them landlocked.

By understanding the various phases of the crappie's reproductive cycle, you can find places that will produce for you from late winter to early summer.

Two years ago, I went crappie fishing at an oxbow off a major river. The woods had been inundated for weeks, but were then draining. I traveled from one oxbow to a smaller oxbow by pulling a flat-bottomed boat through a shallow runout. As I walked, I was amazed at all the small bream and crappie that were following the current out of the oxbow. Unfortunately, that also told me that the bulk of the spawn had already occurred, and that the fish would probably be in the post-spawn phase.

At big highland reservoirs, rises are confined to well-defined vertical basins, so floodwaters go up instead of out. However, crappie respond to them the same way: They'll move to submerged wood cover along the shoreline and spend several days spawning. When you visit your local sporting goods store or bait shop and hear that crappie are on the bank, you'd better get on the water as soon as possible -- because the fish won't stay there long.

Another thing to consider at upland reservoirs is that the crappie's spawning patterns will be staggered from one end of a lake to the other. Since water temperatures warm up sooner in the upper tributaries, crappie move to the shallows in those areas sometimes two or three weeks sooner than they do in the lower ends of a lake, which usually are deeper and colder.