Fishing guide Brad Whitehead shows one very good reason for his preference for fishing with a long pole rather than with a conventional rod-and-reel outfit. Photo courtesy of Brad Whitehead.

If your primary crappie fishing rods are less than 7 feet long, you're leaving crappie untouched every time you go fishing.

"Folks who use only short rods are generally the ones who can catch crappie in the spring when (the fish) are spawning and easy to find," said Dennis Watters, a professional crappie tournament angler. "You can catch a lot of crappie with 6 1/2- or 7-foot spinning rods, but I'll wager that if you learn to use long poles, you'll double, triple, maybe even quadruple your catch rates."

THE LANGUAGE OF LONG POLES
Watters and other crappie-catching experts note that using long rods to fish for crappie at the tournament level has evolved into three basic strategies.

Jigging/Dipping
Spincasting a jig into the brushy, weedy labyrinths favored by spawning crappie is a good way to empty your tackle box and wallet. The logic, simplicity and tackle economy of lowering a jig or minnow vertically into open pockets inside brushpiles and weedbeds is matched by its effectiveness.

"I can use a 10- or 12-foot-long rod to reach into a brushpile or weedbed along a shoreline and lower it into a hole the size of a dinner plate," said semi-pro crappie tournament angler Cory Batterson. "Sometimes in flood-control reservoirs, the crappie will be in the back of coves, under the floating mat of sticks and twigs and weed stems that accumulates back there. If there isn't a hole in that mat, I may use the end of the long rod to gently move the floating stuff and create holes.

"I leave them alone for a few minutes in case I spooked the crappie under there, and then I go back and use that long pole to lower a jig or minnow in there and pull out crappie that no spincasting angler will ever have a chance to catch."

The advantages of using long poles to reach crappie along trashy, shallow shorelines during the spawn are obvious, but according to pro angler Watters, jigging with long poles allows him to catch crappie year 'round.

"If there's a submerged brushpile in 10 to 15 feet of water, the spincasting anglers can only hope to drag their jigs over or beside the brush," he said. "If they park on top of the pile to vertical-jig, they're probably going to spook the crappie.

"I can use my 12- to 16-foot-long poles and work that brushpile and keep my boat far enough away so I don't spook them. In fact, if I want to I can use my side-imaging Humminbird fishfinder to image the brushpile and precisely lower my jigs down into the pile to get the big ones that are burrowed inside."