It’s the same old song and dance every spring for crappie fishing guide Kyle Schoenherr. The crappie waltz up shallow and Schoenherr hustles right into the bushes with them. Like a well-choreographed dance, the crappie preparing to spawn and Schoenherr is trying to catch them before the two tango.
“The process of crappie moving up shallow all starts when water temperatures gets in the upper 50s. Once the temperatures hit the lower 60s, the crappie will consistently be up shallow around the bushes. Normally here on Rend Lake in southern Illinois, the end of March and till the beginning of June crappie will stay in the bushes,” said B’n’M Poles pro staffer Schoenherr. Schoenherr relies on his Lowrance graph to locate bushes where the crappie are hiding. “There are hundreds and hundreds of bushes on Rend Lake, but not every single one will have crappie in them. To locate the ones with crappie on, I put my sonar unit on SideScan with the frequency set on 455kHz and set the distance to 60 feet out because I’m in shallow water. If the boat is in deeper water like six feet, I will set it farther out,” said Schoenherr.
His sonar might show crappie echoes, but mostly it indicates if a bush has a depression around the root. A depression is a key area for crappie to spawn in during the spring. Schoenherr prefers the small bushes to the big, larger bushes have less space under them compared to the smaller bushes thus making it better for spawning.
“Ninety percent of the time the crappie will be dead center in the middle of the bush. So, I always put the lure in the center on the first cast. I might work out from the center a couple casts, but then I move on to the next one,” said Schoenherr. Read the rest on Crappis.com @ this LINK.