While the crowds of anglers on your favorite crappie lake will thin after the spawn, there are still plenty of fish available for the taking. (Shutterstock photo)
May 14, 2025
By Alan Clemons
Finding and catching post-spawn crappies makes for some truly productive and competition-free fishing. The majority of crappie chasers get their kicks during the spawn, but folks who pair a little effort with some angling savvy can produce coolers full of the tasty panfish all spring long.
Similar to largemouth bass, crappies will spend time recuperating after the spawn before moving on to deeper water. After leaving their shallow bedding areas, they seek out the best structure or cover for a much needed respite. This is where they will recover from the spawn, feed aggressively to rebuild their strength and prepare for the hot summer months ahead. These post-spawn areas will be deeper than the fish’s preferred spawning zones, but not too deep and not terribly far from their recent bedding spots.
The great thing about targeting post-spawn crappies is the fast action one experiences once the fish are located. You don’t just pluck a fish here and another there, you frequently catch them in bunches.
A small soft plastic fished on a 1/16- to 1/4-ounce jig head remains a top weapon for crappies, even after they’ve spawned. (Shutterstock photo) SPRING CRAPPIE FISHING Whether you find them on sunken brush or stumps, or around fish attractors deployed by a state wildlife agency, crappies will be bunched up and chilling out, so you can quickly plot a strategy that keeps the hookups coming. Fish live bait? Jigs? Moving baits? All of the above? The ideal choice depends on the situation.
Advertisement
By April or May, water temperatures in Southern lakes and rivers have stabilized and the spawn is in full swing for crappies, bass and other panfish such as bluegills. They all share some similarities during this period, and it’s a good bet that you’ll find members of the three species in pre-spawn, spawning and post-spawn mode in the same body of water.
On the southernmost waterways in the region, crappies will likely spawn earlier than in the more northern lakes like Cumberland, Reelfoot and those on the Tennessee and Mississippi rivers. In lakes such as Seminole (Georgia-Florida border), Weiss (Alabama-Georgia border) or Enid and Sardis in Mississippi, the spawn can occur from mid-March to early April (even earlier in Florida lakes like Okeechobee, Talquin and Monroe), and it can last through May. If you go farther north in the region, the spawn can even trickle into June.
TIMING THE CRAPPIE SPAWN Old timers would say that when the redbuds and dogwoods are blooming, crappies and turkeys are about to get busy. But the timing of the crappie spawn is largely contingent on the water temperature. When it approaches the 60-degree mark, the fish start to think about heading to the shallows. As temps rise to the mid- to high 60s, crappies will finally make their move and find suitable places around cover—usually in 1 to 5 feet of water—to start spawning. Depth can be as much as 8 feet if shallower water lacks desirable cover.
Advertisement
Unlike bass and bluegills, male crappies don’t fan a spot for bedding. Instead, they select an area with gravel or hard bottom around brush, stumps, fallen trees, cattails, reeds or some kind of submerged vegetation. Males then wait for females and will bump and nudge them until they release their eggs so they can fertilize them. The eggs take 3 to 5 days to hatch but, by then, the female crappies are gone. The males, however, stick around to protect the fry.
Since post-spawn crappies stage in large groups, you’ll often catch them in bunches. ( © Steven Oehlenschlager/Dreamstime) TAILORED SLAB TACTICS One of the best ways to catch spawning crappies is to slowly troll minnows under slip corks and artificials such as small, colorful tubes and crankbaits. Minnows should be lively, and lures ought to mimic minnows or insects. Examples include the Bobby Garland Baby Shad and Itty Bit Mayfly , and Z-Man’s Shad FryZ and Micro Goat .
If the fish are on the bank and tight against cover, get your baits as close to it as possible. When dealing with thick cover such as brush piles, scaling down to a single rod may be better than fishing a spider rig involving multiple. While effective, the latter tends to work best over deeper cover and in post-spawn scenarios. Trolling with a single rod and dipping and dabbling the minnow or lure around thicker cover is quieter and more precise, plus it reduces hangups. An anchor or Power-Pole comes in handy when you find a hot spot.
Crappies feed most actively at dawn and dusk, foraging close to the shore and around shallow cover. They’re opportunistic and won’t hesitate to make a meal of any insect, minnow or small crayfish, and they even take advantage of special events such as mayfly hatches. During the post-spawn, when most crappies stage in 6 to 10 feet of water, they’ll move up to feed. This may mean vertically around a patch of vegetation, closer to the shore or both. It all depends on the location of the available food.
Catch a mess of crappie at night. (Shutterstock photo) TROLLING TIPS Years ago, the late Jim Duckworth, a renowned Tennessee crappie guide, shared some valuable post-spawn tips with me. We were on Kentucky Lake in northwest Tennessee, more specifically on Birdsong Creek, which feeds the massive lake. Birdsong itself is fairly large, with numerous channel bends, coves and ample cover. Duckworth was fond of trolling 1/4-ounce jig heads with curly-tail grubs and 100-, 200- and 300-series Bandit crankbaits , a post-spawn tactic that works great with spider rigs. Multiple rods on the front deck and both sides of the boat cover different depths and allow for a variety of baits, live or artificial. I’ve fished this way for post-spawn crappies with veteran Reelfoot Lake guide Billy Blakely, too. He sticks with live minnows because “it’s hard to beat the real thing” and he’s not fond of the hangups that sometimes occur with jigs and lures with treble hooks.
Both Duckworth and Blakely troll at a creeping pace of about 2 mph, making slight adjustments as necessary. Sometimes a slower speed triggers the bite and, in other occasions, crappies prefer a slightly faster presentation. Duckworth would fish six rods and troll quietly through an area to pinpoint the depth at which crappies were holding. In post-spawn, they’d be deeper off the bank or out toward the main channel, and the guide would select the appropriate crankbait to troll just over their heads, since crappies typically feed while looking up. This method works during the post-spawn and on through summer, as crappies chase minnows at various depths.
Side-trolling is a similar tactic made popular by Mississippi guide Roger Gant. Instead of placing his rods in holders on the bow and along the boat’s gunwales, he would line them all up on one side, fore to aft. Gant mounted a trolling motor on the opposite side and trolled slowly. This allowed him and his clients to easily watch and work the rigs and cover a wider swath of water more effectively.
SHOOTING DOCKS Post-spawn crappies will move around, but they gravitate toward cover and structure, especially that with immediate access to both shallow and deep water, such as a line of docks or boathouses on a creek channel. Shooting docks with spinning rods and jigs can be dynamite. One May, years ago, I fished with a friend on Lake Guntersville in a creek that swung in close to a line of docks. Four or five of them neared the biggest creek bend, and that’s where we caught a bunch of fish.
It takes practice to shoot docks consistently. You start by pinching the jig between your index finger and thumb with the hook point out while holding the rod and line with your other hand. You pull the jig back to create a bend in the rod, then release the lure and line simultaneously to shoot your offering under the structure. We used simple 1/16- and 1/4-ounce ball-head jigs with a curly-tail grub, and swam it out slowly before shooting it again.
SIMPLICITY PAYS Finally, using a simple slip cork and minnow on a hook can get the job done for post-spawn crappies. In many Southern waters, anglers and fish have plenty of vegetation at their disposal, including lily pads, hydrilla, milfoil, coontail and others. Crappies seek it for shade and protection and to ambush forage. Checking these areas with a minnow rig is easy and can be done from any watercraft, including canoes and kayaks, or even by wading. Keep in mind that not all fish, including crappies, rush out to deep water for summer. If there are shallow spots with cool water and ample oxygen and food, fish will use them.
This article was featured in the May 2025 issue of Game & Fish magazine. Click to subscribe
