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