In late winter and early spring, crappies often hang around deep structure and cover, and live sonar excels in this situation. (Shutterstock image)
February 03, 2025
By Mike Pehanich
The last time I joined Kyle Schoenherr to hunt crappies on southern Illinois’ lakes Egypt and Kinkaid, 12- and 14-foot rods reached like arachnid legs from four-spread, bow-mounted rod holders. Schoenherr, with team partner Rodney Neuhaus, had amassed an impressive tournament record that included three national titles, numerous top-three finishes and an Alabama state title, among other accolades, before retiring from tournament competition in 2018. He then became a full-time guide on prime crappie waters near his southern Illinois home. He’d lost none of his crappie-fishing passion in those intervening years, but a Garmin LiveScope screen had replaced the rod holders of his spider-rigging days at the bow of his 22-foot Ranger .
“Forward-facing sonar has changed the way I fish for crappies,” Schoenherr says, “It’s changed the way I guide for nine months of the year.”
Aside from the pre-spawn and spawning periods, when he frequently targets cover-oriented crappies in pockets of thick buckbrush, Schoenherr’s crappie fishing today consists largely of real-time encounters with fish digitally represented on a sonar screen. His approach mirrors the tectonic shift crappie fishing has experienced in recent years.
“Live sonar”—forward-facing sonar and 360 imaging—and the strategies associated with it, have largely supplanted the sport’s more conventional, old-school tactics. Seeing target fish and lures in real time has revolutionized crappie fishing, with many anglers now favoring electronics-centered approaches over the more traditional tactics and knowledge upon which past generations of crappie anglers relied.
Advertisement
SITTING DUCKS Live sonar dominates the tournament scene, and it’s reinventing the fishing practices of everyday anglers. How difficult is it to master? Facile use of the technology takes practice and time on the water, but learning curves vary radically—from days and weeks to a full season or more. Newer generations, raised with video games and smartphones, learn it more quickly due to their familiarity with screens and their improved hand-eye coordination.
The single biggest advantage of live-image fishing is the reduction of wasted casts and unproductive time on the water. Dedicated users may not make a cast—or the bulk of their casts—until they’ve found a promising school of fish. Experienced FFS anglers may even single out the largest members of the school and aim to pluck them from the herd.
“Most of the season, we are targeting specific fish and specific year-classes of fish,” Schoenherr says. “With eyes on the screen, I am basically directing traffic for my clients, instructing them to work right and left, up and down, telling them how to position their baits laterally or to the depth at which the fish are holding. If the wind is blowing from the left, it will push the boat to the right, so I direct them to compensate for that boat movement, too.”
Advertisement
Oddly enough, bass pros first drew my attention to the FFS/crappie connection. With stars atop the bass world like Jacob Wheeler claiming to have sharpened their FFS skills casting to crappies on screens, I figured serious crappie anglers were onto the game as well—and they were.
“FFS has impacted crappie fishing even more than bass fishing,” says Cory Schmidt, outdoor journalist and marketing manager for Z-Man Fishing Products . “If you don’t have FFS, you don’t enter crappie competitions today.”
The species is tailor-made to the open-water sport that FFS shapes.
“It’s the nature of crappie,” Schmidt says. “For the most part, they don’t move around a lot. When they school, you find them hovering over brush piles and in open water. You can Spot-Lock on them. They are sitting ducks—easy targets with live sonar.”
FFS is also helpful in identifying key crappie-holding structure and cover. Schmidt says this technology is in some ways at its best when used to find so-called sweet spots—breaks on structure (rocks, stumps, cuts, etc.)—as well as overlooked areas that hold fish. It’s especially effective, he adds, when fishing weed lines because anglers can use it to find crappies in pockets in the weeds.
Even old-time “dock shooters” are finding huge advantages with the technology. Using FFS, they can not only avoid docks devoid of fish but also determine the fish’s position in the water column on deeper docks. This, of course, isn’t the end of the technology’s potential crappie-fishing applications.
LEARN AND ADAPT FFS sparks controversy in tournament and conservation discussions alike. But, its value as a learning mechanism is undeniable—and virtually irresistible, even among those preaching caution and restraint with its usage. Schmidt, who has a degree in fisheries biology and worked with the Minnesota DNR for some time, feels the technology may even be more valuable in this capacity than as a fishing tool. His own use of FFS has revealed some key observations.
For starters, he’s noticed that these fish, which have acute vision to allow them to feed on tiny zooplankton, often inspect a bait for some time before ultimately eating. While crappies may occasionally feed nose-down on invertebrates in shallow substrate, Schmidt says his experiences—and those of other anglers using FFS—also show they are highly reluctant to chase baits that drop below them. He suggests positioning any baits roughly a foot or so above fish as a general practice, and Schoenherr concurs.
“You don’t want to let your bait get below a crappie once it has noticed it,” Schoenherr says. “It has nothing to do with whether they feed up or down. They do feed up, but I have also seen them hit going down on the fall. But if you drop the bait below or even level with that fish, you might as well move on to another fish. Once a fish sees your bait and is debating whether to strike, it is rarely going to touch a bait that falls below.”
How quickly or slowly a bait falls and the way it falls can also be quite important. For this reason—and due to crappies’ varying dietary preferences—anglers should keep a range of plastics (and live bait, if so inclined) and jigs of various weights, sizes and head shapes on hand. All affect drop rate and bait action. Jigs dropping with a darting or spiraling action can capture a crappie’s attention nicely, and Schmidt says in some cases crappies will rocket up 15 feet or more when they see a bait coming.
“I keep a lot of sizes and a lot of bait profiles at hand, because every day is different,” says Schoenherr, who divides his crappie time among the prime southern Illinois reservoirs of Rend Lake, Lake of Egypt and Kinkaid Lake. “Profile and size are more important than a specific color or bait brand. But presentation is more important than either. And what the fish prefer can change, sometimes hour to hour.”
Compact tungsten jigs get baits down quickly—a clear advantage when crappies are positioned deep. But a buoyant plastic on a light jig or a jig/plastic or jig/minnow combo suspended beneath a sensitively balanced bobber might be a better choice with fish positioned high in the water column. For fish positioned low in the water column, Schmidt prefers a drop-shot rig with buoyant plastics like the Z-Man StingerZ or Shad FryZ . A long dropper line can extend the range of the rig’s effectiveness. While live bait still has its place, jig-and-plastic combinations comprise the lion’s share of the bait offerings.
Don’t despair if you are deficient in video game skills. Pinpoint accuracy is not essential. At times, it may even be counterproductive.
“The biggest mistake people make with forward-facing sonar is trying to drop the bait in the fish’s face,” Schoenherr says. “A shad is not going to swim right up to a crappie. The key is to keep the bait above them—close enough so they can see it, of course, but you want them to come to you. You may have to do different things—pop it on them, swing it past them, zip it over their head. Just don’t let the bait fall below them or even level with them.”
WHAT’S NEXT? Both Schmidt and Schoenherr are as concerned about the impact of FFS as they are intrigued by it. While catch-and-release prevails among bass anglers, that same conservation ethic has found more slippery footing in the panfish world where an evening fish fry is often the culmination of the day. Schoenherr has already noticed its effect on crappie populations and no longer keeps any fish under 10 inches on guided trips.
“Am I a huge fan of FFS?” Schoenherr asks. “Not really. But I use it daily. It is definitely the best technology out there. That is a fact. And I need it for my customers.”
Schmidt is similarly concerned.
“We are learning so much about fish behavior from live imaging,” he says. “But we are also learning how limited some fisheries are. You can change the entire population dynamics of a small lake.
“But as a learning tool, you can’t beat it. We can only hope that, as we learn more about the locations, the habitat and the habits of our fish, we also learn to care more about our fisheries as well.”