Not Your Grandfather’s Jigging Spoon

Recently I had the chance to fish with Brian Thrift, one of the hottest upcoming FLW bass anglers on the tour. Brian wound up finishing in the top five on the FLW tour this pat year, and we were doing a photo shoot and some bass fishing at Lake Wylie on the North Carolina/South Carolina border.

The weather had turned cold and the lake’s large population of threadfin shad was bunched up thick deep in the tributary creek channels all over the lake. It’s not inconceivable that an angler could be fishing just a couple of boat lengths away from a concentration of bass and never get a look because of the sheer mass of shad between the angler and the fish.

“It’s hard to get their attention when they’re like this,” explained Thrift from the bow of his Ranger bass boat. “Look at them on the graph and it’s just wall-to-wall shad.”

One of Thrift’s tools for trying to attract attention in this “needle in the haystack” situation is to get over the top of the fish and the bait and put a jigging spoon on them. I love the jigging spoon but was surprised when I saw what he had tied to his line. I’m used to fishing a heavy chunk of metal with a painted or hammered finish. The beauty is you maintain complete contact with the bait — even during the fall — because of the weight of the jig.

Thrift’s lure was a Flutter Spoon, a Lake Fork Tackle product that he had customized with an additional treble hook on the tie end. The bait still had enough weight to maintain good contact, even on a long cast. He put the lure in play and continually ripped it through the schools of shad.

“Every so often you’ll wind up with a shad or two on the hook, but that just means you’re fishing it right,” Thrift said.

It wasn’t long before he got the attention of one of the chunky largemouths that were keeping a watchful eye on the “herd” for strays. His rod soon bent double with a nice winter bass. That’s when I realized he was on to something — this wasn’t your grandfather’s jigging spoon.

For more info on the Flutter Spoon, check out www.lftlures.com.

Phillip Gentry
pgentry6@bellsouth.net

Finesse Angler Creates “Cult” Following

We’ve started getting some cold weather in South Carolina, and for the last few mornings the recent rain that collected on the cover of my boat has turned to ice. Locally, our resident lake temperatures have dipped into the mid to lower 50s, and by all accounts it looks to be an early winter.

The only pleasant thing I can say about winter crappie fishing is that I’m a member of a crappie “cult” following that a local bait manufacturer has amassed — followers of the Slabtail jig. You see them on every lake within 100 miles of here. Boats camped out under bridges and over brushpiles, anglers intently staring at the limber rods in their hands. To say the tactics, gear and attitude of Fish Stalker Lures proprietor Tom Mundy are finesse oriented is a gross understatement. Mundy’s tactics shine when our lakes — and particularly Lake Murray — turn cold and crappie move deep into brushpiles to sit and shiver.

While fishing with Mundy last winter during my indoctrination to his finesse style of crappie fishing, he handed me a rod he had made using a 6½-foot ice-fishing rod blank. The corresponding reel was a discontinued Zebco 33 spin-cast model spooled with 4-pound Mr. Crappie camouflage line. The rod quivers in your hand, it’s impossible to hold still. A local outdoor TV show host, another follower, told Mundy that “if your heart is beating, that rod tip is quivering.”

On the business end of the line is a 1/64-ounce jighead and a Fish Stalker Slabtail jig body. The plastic tail is simplistic in design, a 1½-inch solid body with a flat, pointed tail. Mundy hooks the bait flat so the tail flaps up and down and not side to side.

The key to the presentation is that Mundy drops the tiny bait straight down into a deep brushpile, a feat that takes a little time with such a small bait. The small gap in the tiny hook rarely hangs in the brush. Mundy then engages the reel and slowly turns the handle on the smoothest low-gear-ratio reel I’ve ever fished. Regardless of how deep the fish are or where they bite, he always goes to the bottom and inches the bait upward.

He asked me to watch the rod while he retrieved. Trying to exhibit my crappie fishing prowess, I watched with eagle eyes as he reeled.

“See that?” he asked.

“I didn’t see anything,” I protested.

“Exactly,” he said with a sharp upward snap of his forearm and proceeded to reel in a cold-water slab that weighed just over 2 pounds.

“What just happened?” I asked, confused.

“The rod quivers during the retrieve,” he explained. “When it stops moving, a crappie just inhaled the jig. The combination of deep brush, tiny baits and an in-your-face presentation is more than the crappie can stand.”
With a little practice, I was soon hooked too.
For more information on Mundy’s finesse tactics and tackle, visit his website at www.fishstalker.com.

Phillip Gentry
pgentry6@bellsouth.net

A New Twist To An Old Tactic

I guess the saying, “The more things change, the more they stay the same,” has its applications when it comes to crappie fishing. I’m forever intrigued when tried-and-true tactics for specific species of fish are applied to fishing for different species of fish, especially crappie. In evidence of this, I’ve written articles about using umbrella rigs and planer boards for crappie.

A few days ago I was reading the box scores of a crappie tournament. If you know where to look on the Internet, some clubs and trails post not only who won and what their weights were but also how the winners caught their fish. I’d seen mention of pulling inline spinners a couple of times in the past, but what really caught my attention was an advertisement by Lindy Tackle with Todd Huckabee holding up a big slab with an inline spinner rig in its mouth.

I’ve never caught a walleye in my life, but I know the inline spinner rig is murder on deep-water walleyes. Apparently somebody at Lindy — folks who have caught plenty of walleyes — decided to put the inline spinner to a new test and came up with the Flicker Spider Rig.

The Flicker comes pre-tied and is designed very similarly to a dual-hook rig for tight lining but incorporates an innovative cross-line swivel in place of the popular three-way swivel and adds a clevis and small Colorado blade complete with beads ahead of the top hook. The rig comes in five different weight options from ¼ ounce up to 1 ounce. The Flicker was introduced at the ICAST show earlier this year but has not made it to major retailers yet. I called Huckabee to get the lowdown on how they worked.

“These are great for deep slow-trolling,” says Huckabee. “I’m using them on Eufaula now while crappie are holding along the first drop and raiding the shallows feeding on threadfin shad getting beefed up for winter.”

The Oklahoma guide and Lindy pro-staffer fishes the Flicker in spider-rig fashion, pushing six rods from the front of the boat. He matches the hatch with a threadfin-sized minnow on the rig but says they’ll work well with a jig skirt on the hook for those days when crappie turn up their noses at live bait. The added flash of the blade is a big key to getting bites. Huckabee says the rigs, along with Lindy’s version of the standard pre-tied spider-rig, should be available at major retailers in December.

Remember, it doesn’t cost anything to set the hook.

Phillip Gentry
gentry6@bellsouth.net

Trolling Crankbaits Is Not Just a Summertime Tactic

I’ve got to admit that I love trolling crankbaits for crappie even though it’s a tough situation for me. Here in the East, most of our lakes are deep, clear and full of cover-loving black crappie. As you know, trolling crankbaits usually is a tactic for suspended white crappie in murky water. I catch fish, but they’re usually 3- to 5-pound stripers or hybrids.

My 12-year-old son, Will, and I had the chance to meet up with Kent Driscoll of B’n’M Poles this summer at Mississippi’s Sardis Lake, and we had a blast trolling crankbaits. Kent knows his stuff and we caught some slabs on a hot day that Kent considered just average. Kent said the hotter the weather the hotter the tactic got.

It was with surprise that I opened the latest newsletter from the Magnolia Crappie Club and discovered that the first two places in the club’s October tournament at Ferguson, an oxbow lake full of cool Mississippi River water, was won by trolling cranks. That prompted a call to MCC’s president, Brad Taylor, for an explanation.


Brad admitted he was caught short, too, placing sixth using tight-lined minnows. Jim McKay and Tommy Moss took first, and writer Paul Johnson and Gil Woodis took second — all on crankbaits.

“It’s a suspended-fish tactic, not just a summertime tactic” was Brad’s explanation, indicating the crappie at Ferguson were suspended, chasing migrating shad and not really relating to any specific structure. That’s the same pattern for summer fishing except during summer they’re suspending in the thermocline to avoid the heat and bottom predators. Brad summed it up by saying that trolling cranks for crappie was still a largely undiscovered art. I tend to agree with him. I just wish somebody who has figured out how to do it in clear-water lakes would let me know. Somebody send me an e-mail.

Phillip Gentry
pgentry6@bellsouth.net

Boat Docks Come Alive

I love October. Summer’s heat is gone, and most of the fishing pressure from sportsmen who are more interested in deer hunting than crappie fishing is gone. In my home state of South Carolina, we are in the grip of a 2-year drought that has some of our lake levels at record lows. At this time of year, crappie typically will move in around boat docks, especially those that have some brush or permanent pilings under them.

The drought is presenting a headache because some of my favorite docks are either high and dry or too shallow to hold any fish. As I have written about both in Crappie World and in my weekly outdoor column for the Seneca Daily Journal, low water is more of a problem for fishermen than it is for fish. Whitey Outlaw told me that, and he should know. His backyard in the Santee Cooper swamp became a pasture last spring, and he practically had to re-learn the lake.

Fortunately, this drought has a silver lining. It’s reducing the number of boat docks that are in the water. That means that almost any dock that still has decent water under it is holding a pretty good number of crappie.

My buddy Bill Brookshire and I sat in front of one of these deep docks sticking 4½-foot rods up under the dock and jigging fish out. I call these rods "bridge rods” because I typically use them to vertical jig around tight bridge pilings. The crappie seemed to adjust to the retreating water level by settling to the bottom and lying in some brush tops where they could ambush threadfin shad that were moving into the shallows. Why is it that water temperatures stay in the 60s for a month during spring and fly back through them in just a few days during fall?

Phillip Gentry
pgentry6@bellsouth.net

The Ultimate Crappie Boat

I have this discussion with just about everyone I meet who fishes for crappie. What is the ultimate boat for crappie fishing? I will admit that manufacturers are beginning to recognize that the watercrafts much change as crappie tactics change. I guess that’s why a lot of the tournament guys are moving from small aluminum johnboats to fiberglass bass boats.

With the popularity of tight-lining, many of these boats feature dual side-by-side pedestal seats in the front where two anglers can work a number of rods set in T-bars around the bow. I think that a lot of anglers are discovering that open-water crappie are a less-pressured fish for more than 10 months out of the year, and they’re looking for bigger boats with more stability in open water.

Why not go all the way with a wide, low, center-console boat to fish for crappie? I don’t want to upset anybody who has their boat laid out just the way they want it. Just like crappie baits, confidence is a big factor in catching fish, and that concept applies to boats.

When I traded in my old boat this past summer, I opted for a 21½-foot War Eagle Coastal Tomahawk. This is essentially a tough-as-nails aluminum bay boat that I asked John Ward to “tweak.” He added the dual sockets for tight-lining and a 4-stroke 150 Yamaha outboard for pulling crankbaits. Eight (yes, eight) trolling bars and 30 Driftmaster rod holders later, and this baby is ready to rock. You’ll be hearing a bunch more about this boat in future blogs.

Phillip Gentry
pgentry6@bellsouth.net

Pontoons Can Be Late-Summer Hotspots

I was re-watching a video my friend Russ Bailey had sent to me a couple of years ago. Russ hosts Midwest Crappie, and since I don’t get the show on any of my satellite stations, he mails me his shows on disk. On this episode Russ was shooting jigs under docked pontoon boats. After I saw this particular show, I decided to head over to one of my home lakes and give it a shot.

Russ’s explanation on the video was that crappie are drawn to the pontoons during late summer because they offer cover at night when the water starts to cool and shade during the day when the water warms up again.

On this day I also wanted to try shooting 1/32-ounce jigs tipped with Berkley Gulp! Alive minnows. The folks at Berkley sent me some of these to try and the 2½-inch smelt looked like a dead-on imitation of the threadfin shad that were moving around the lake.

What a day! Just as Russ explained, the crappie were under the pontoons. We found them really stacked under a small private marina loaded with pontoons that were tarped and tied for the season. The Gulp! minnows caught fish 5-to-1 to what my buddy was using until he switched over. The water was about 10 feet deep so we’d shoot under the bow end, count to five and start a slow, steady retrieve. For some reason, the bite would come just as the bait was about to clear the pontoon, which was fine by me. Some of these fish were better than a pound and a half, and I doubt we could have boated as many if they’d bit the jigs farther back under the pontoon.

Phillip Gentry
pgentry6@bellsouth.net

Introducing Phillip Gentry: Fisherman, Writer, Interpreter

When I was a toddler back in the mid-1960s, my parents were in the process of building a lake cabin on South Carolina’s Lake Hartwell. To keep me out of trouble, my dad built a chicken-wire fence to keep me out of the water. It took me awhile to figure out how to slip under the fence to get down to the lake, and that has been my life’s ambition ever since — slipping out of my daily confines and getting down to the water.

Some years ago I decided to become an interpreter. That is, I would find out all I could about the outdoors, particularly fishing, from the pros and experts and share what I learned with others. The day I met noted Pickwick crappie guide Brad Whitehead, he told me I wasn’t like other writers he knew. I took that to mean he recognized I was a fisherman first and then a writer. He was correct.

I’ve always been a crappie fisherman, even though I mispronounce the word. My goal with this blog is to keep interpreting. We’ll compare the way ya’ll do it and the way we do it, and we’ll all be better off in the end. E-mail me if you have some crappie ideas you want to share.

Phillip Gentry
pgentry6@bellsouth.net