Phillip Gentry

Post-Spawn Bassin’ Blues?

2009-05-26T11:06:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I spent a day in the boat with professional bass angler Mike DelVisco. DelVisco is a full-time pro on the Bassmaster Tour as well as the ABA Grand Slam and PAA Tour. In addition to competing, he also conducts seminars at many popular sport shows all around the country. You’re most likely to run into him at your local Texas Roadhouse Restaurant giving away prizes and teaching kids about bass fishing.

For me, late May can be a tough time because a lot of our fish are played out and are in that dreaded post-spawn transition. However, DelVisco and I had a great day on the water. This was due in part to getting to fish out of his brand-new Phoenix bass boat, a sweet ride that’s one of the best deals on the market today, and also because he was able to get us on some good fish.

While I was expecting to fight off lockjaw, he explained that though bass might be off the beds, the local shad population was still at it and that meant post-spawn bass would be nearby and restocking their fat reserves.

“A lot of anglers have a hard time adjusting when bass come off the beds, but a little understanding of what’s going on under the surface can still get you on some fish,” said the Texas Roadhouse pro angler. “Just look for fish to be suspended out off sandy, rocky points in the areas where threadfin shad come in to do their thing.”

DelVisco employed a Yo-Zuri shallow-diving crankbait to mimic the frenzied shad as they headed to the bank. Our day’s bag of largemouth included several chunky males and one big sow that topped the scales at more than 7 pounds. According to DelVisco, capitalizing on the shad spawn is a window of opportunity.

“It’s a daylight bite,” he explained. “Right at first light, the shad will be on the banks spawning, and the bass are right behind them. Sometimes you get bites for an hour, some days two, but once the sun gets up it’s pretty much over and time to go find another pattern.”

Cloudy or windy days that block out sunlight may extend the action during the shad spawn, but don’t expect to get much action if you aren’t on the water at first light or late in the afternoon just before the sun goes down.

For more tips from bass pro Mike DelVisco, check out his bass bytes video series at www.bassbytes.tv

Phillip Gentry

pgentry6@bellsouth.net

Picking the Right Docks to Fish

2009-05-04T06:24:00.001-07:00

Depending on where you’re located across the country, now is the time most crappie anglers look forward to. Crappie are either just before, right in the middle or coming off the spring spawn. In any case, now is one of the best times of the year to find crappie hanging out around boat docks. However, like most other things in life, not all boat docks are created equal. That bears the question — how do you pick the best dock to fish?

“If I had to pick the most important feature of a boat dock to fish for crappie, it would have to be how close is it to deep water,” says crappie pro Mike Walters. “If a dock has lights and rod holders all around it, a lot of guys always assume that’s a great place to find crappie because more than likely the owner has brushpiles or stakebeds nearby. The truth is, if the dock isn’t located in the right area in regard to depth, all that structure isn’t going to change a bad location into a good spot.”

Walters should know. As a national tournament angler and member of the B’n’M pro staff, he fishes lakes from Florida to Oklahoma, including the lakes around his hometown of Troy, Ohio. One of his favorite tactics is shooting docks for crappie, so he’s learned the hard way how to cull so-so docks from great ones.

“If I’m new to a lake or area of a lake, I’ll take a topographic map and look for places where the creek or river channels move in close to shore,” Walters says. “The dock doesn’t have to have deep water under it but I believe it has to be close by. You can have a great-looking dock way back on a shallow flat and it may hold a few fish, but I’ve never known crappie to travel a long way across a lot of shallow water to get to a dock.”

Once he’s found a dock he wants to fish, Walters pulls out his trusty B’n’M rod. With the accuracy of a Wild West marksman, Walters puts his jig in places most people never fish. But he also has a little secret that helps him both slow his presentation and detect bites when the going is tough.

He uses a grape-sized ice float on the line above his jig. This allows him to shoot docks without worrying about the jig getting hung up in structure under the dock.

“I rig the float like a slip-cork,” Walters says. “Crappie typically aren’t real deep this time of year, so I’ll adjust the stop to just a foot or so up the line. The other advantage is that the cork and jig stay together when shot and then separate once the float hits the water. Crappie are pretty aggressive during the spawn, so detecting a bite is pretty easy. But if the going is slow, watch the cork for any movement that indicates the fish is moving off to the side or coming up with the jig. Leaving it dead still works great too. Sometimes that jig just dangling over a nest for several seconds is more than that crappie can stand.”

For more tips and tactics from Walters and other B’n’M pros, check out the B’n’M website at www.bnmpoles.com.

Send me your fish pictures and stories, I’d like to see them.

Phillip Gentry
pgentry6@bellsouth.net

Side Pulling’s Next Generation

2009-04-10T06:32:00.001-07:00

I had the chance to get together with a good fishing buddy over the weekend. I met Brad Whitehead a few years ago while working with some of the B’n’M pros, and we hit it off immediately as crappie fishermen and also as friends. Brad is a guide on Alabama’s Pickwick, Wilson, and Wheeler Reservoirs as well as a member of the B’n’M Poles, Vicious Fishing, and War Eagle Boats pro-staffs.

Brad called me earlier in the week to break the news that he was converting his primary fishing style over to side pulling. Side pulling is a tactic made famous by Roger Gant, another well respected Pickwick guide and mentor to Whitehead. Brad offered that while the whole crappie fishing industry was changing over to various long-pole trolling tactics, even after 30 years Gant still caught more fish-day in and day out-than anyone else he knew by using the side-pulling method.

That’s not to say that side pulling hasn’t changed some through the years. A few years ago, Gant went to John Ward at War Eagle Boats and suggested an entire design package for War Eagle’s 754 VS model. This was the boat that Whitehead had this weekend.

“This boat makes fishing so much easier,” says Whitehead. “Everything is laid out within easy reach. You don’t even have to get out of your seat to go from running the big motor to the trolling motor or to put a fish in the livewell.”

Like all heirs to a dynasty, Whitehead intends to put his personal spin on the time-tested tactic. He said he saw a lot of additional potential that would lend itself to other styles of fishing, as well.

“I can pull corks, long-line troll, and troll crankbaits with this setup,” he says. “And there’s some stuff I’ll be doing differently with baits and electronics that I think will be unique to this type of crappie fishing.”

After the weekend on the water with Brad, he had me convinced as well. The frequent cold fronts passing through north Alabama made the fishing tough, but the side-pulling method allowed us to slow down and pick off big spawning fish that were hunkered down around stumps and breaklines.

For more information on War Eagle’s side pulling design, visit their website at www.wareagleboats.com or give Brad Whitehead a call at (256) 483-0834.

Phillip Gentry
pgentry6@bellsouth.net

How Side Imaging And Digital Mapping Are Changing The Face Of Crappie Fishing

2009-03-18T08:29:00.001-07:00

I’ve known professional crappie angler Kent Driscoll for several years, and sometimes I wonder if he doesn’t have a twin brother. Kent’s one of the busiest guys I know, and he’s a great outdoorsman. In addition, Kent regularly fishes a number of crappie tournament trails and is consistently one of the top finishers. He also attends regular speaking engagements on behalf of War Eagle Boats and heads up the B’n’M Poles pro staff.

One of the ways he stays on top of the tournament boards is by mastering the latest tactics and technology. For example, Kent recently fished and won a Magnolia Crappie Club tournament at Ross Barnett. Barnett is the home lake for a lot of the MCC guys, and Kent admitted he hadn’t fished there in close to 10 years. So how do you show up on the home turf of some of the best crappie guys in the state of Mississippi and beat them on their home lake?

Kent used his Humminbird 997. Now I’ve seen the 997 on several guys’ boats, and I’ve even fished with Kent where he showed me what his could do. At the Ross Barnett tournament, Kent and pretty much everyone else in the field knew that big slab crappie would be stacked up on the ledges and edges of the main Pearl River channel that winds through the fairly shallow reservoir. Kent’s edge came in finding a pattern within a pattern.

“We caught a ton of fish but figured out the bigger crappie were holding on little fingers that stuck out into the main channel,” Driscoll explains. “Then it was just a matter of tracking down those areas — which were clearly visible on my Navionics digital mapping software that’s loaded in the 997. Once we got to an area, one pass down the channel with the side imaging and we could see both the stumps the fish were holding on and the fish themselves.”

Driscoll and his partner then set up to tight-line Capps and Coleman minnow rigs, splitting the ledge with Driscoll’s War Eagle and running one side up on top of the ledge and the other side on the drop. What was the result?

“I caught my first three-pound fish in competition,” Driscoll exclaims. “Add to that another hoss that weighed 2.65 pounds and another five fish that averaged 2.3 pounds each and we had a total weight out of seven fish that weighed 16.18 pounds.”

I’ll have to admit that’s not the first time I’ve heard side imaging and digital mapping credited for winning fishing tournaments.

For more information on side finder technology, check out www.humminbird.com.

Phillip Gentry
pgentry6@bellsouth.net

Trying To Reason With March Snow

2009-03-03T11:33:00.001-08:00

I had an interesting discussion with Wade Mansfield over the weekend. Wade is the younger generation behind Grizzly Jig Company, the largest crappie fishing supplier in the country. Wade is also a formidable tournament angler and a member of the American Angler pro-staff fishing team.

Wade’s home lake is Reelfoot in Tennessee — the quake lake that’s been touted as one of the most fertile crappie factories in the country. Team American Angler has been trying to get a few pre-fish days in before the next Crappie Masters one-day on March 7. We were lamenting the typical spring patterns where nice warm weather over the last few days had started to warm the crappie fishing up and then a hard cold front like the one that’s just spread across most of the country loaded with snow and ice will be sending the fish deep again. Since 10 feet is considered deep water for Reelfoot, Wade figures they’ll be back to tight-lining near the bottom once the weather clears but hopes the fish will come up again by the end of the week.

That discussion prompted a question about tight-lining for suspended crappie. Mansfield and his partner have had the best success with either straight minnows or jig-and-minnow combos. I asked him how he kept from spooking crappie when targeting crappie that are suspended only a few feet below the surface.

“We really rely on the long rods in these situations,” Mansfield says. “We’ll use up to 20-footers to reach way out away from the boat.”

I thought about my 12-foot rods and how I love to fuss when the line wraps around the tip and I have to hand-over-hand the rod to unwrap the tangle. I cannot imagine handling a 20-foot rod.

“It takes practice,” Mansfield says, but he insists the learning curve is far offset by the reach that was afforded by the extreme-length rods.

“I don’t think many anglers realize how spooky crappie can get when they get shallow,” Mansfield says. “The shadow of a big boat plus the noise and commotion created by the trolling motor will scatter crappie. I’ve seen what happens first hand while scuba diving or snorkeling around the dock, the slap of a boat paddle or any commotion will make them dart off. They’ll return, but it takes a while.”

Good luck to Wade and all the competitors this weekend. In the meantime, I guess I’ll go back to re-lining reels and pouring jigs and hope that the 3 inches of snow we got tonight won’t send us all back to square one.

Phillip Gentry
pgentry6@bellsouth.net

Doodling For Crappie

2009-02-17T07:17:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago I scheduled a trip to fish on Georgia’s Lake Sydney Lanier. I was the guest of 1988 Bassmaster Classic qualifier Doug Youngblood, who fishes Lanier more than 300 days a year and is just a phenomenal angler.

Lanier is an awesome lake for a number of species of fish. Located on the outskirts of metro-Atlanta, the lake gets a good bit of both boating and fishing pressure during the warmer months. During winter, you’re likely to have the lake almost to yourself.

Doug offered to show me some umbrella-rig tactics for Lanier’s good population of hefty stripers but admitted the bite didn’t turn on until late afternoon after the sun had a chance to warm the water closer to the 50-degree mark. He suggested we spend some time fishing crappie out from under boat docks as a consolation. Some consolation — the cold-water crappie bite was awesome thanks in part to Doug’s knowledge of Lanier’s crappie habits.

We spent the day using a tactic that Youngblood referred to as doodling — a cold-weather trick for spotted bass. A variation of drop-shotting, doodling for crappie involves tying two 1/64-ounce jigs inline on 4-pound test line. For it to work, you basically need to drop the baits on the crappie’s nose.

Lanier has a tremendous, widely underutilized population of black crappie. Most visitors and locals go for either spotted bass or stripers. Since it is located so close to a major metropolitan area, Lanier has a number of large immaculate homes that come equipped with equally large and immaculate boat docks. Many of the docks perch over deep, clear water and provide an ample amount of cover for crappie.

Doodling for crappie involved getting in close enough to the docks to drop the light jigs into the corners and let them sink on a tight line. At 20 feet deep, Youngblood began a
slow-as-molasses retrieve while shaking the rod tip. The bite was mushy, anything that interrupted the feel of the jig was worth a quick snap of the wrist to set the hook. After the first fish, the dense schools of crappie under the dock would turn on and each spot that held fish yielded a dozen or more before the bite cut off. Then it was on to the next dock.

We ended the day with a three-man limit of more than 100 crappie, which is pretty good for consolation fishing.

For more information about Lake Lanier or to line up a trip with Doug Youngblood, contact him at www.fishlanier.com.

Phillip Gentry
pgentry6@bellsouth.net

You Heard It Here First

2009-02-03T06:40:00.000-08:00

The Crappie Masters tournament results are in from the Seminole County Florida Championship this past weekend, and I want to tell you about the folks who came in 13th place. While that may sound strange, the reason I’m dedicating this week’s column to Mike and Tracy Miller is because they ended day one in 38th place after a day of tight-lining, then completed day two in 22nd place using a variety of the same old tactics and then swapped over to a brand new tactic seldom seen in crappie fishing circles. They jumped 9 places breaking the top 15 and finishing among names that you regularly read about in Crappie World magazine.

What was their tactic? Pulling planer boards. Now part of the reason I’m so ecstatic about the Miller’s 13 place finish is because I received a care package from Bruce DeShano at Offshore Tackle a couple of weeks ago with several pairs of his new mini planer boards — the ones that I’ve been anticipating from this great company for close to a year. The second reason is that I wrote a feature about the use of planer boards about two years ago in Crappie World. When talking with several pros later about planer boards, I got only lukewarm responses about their potential. Now, with tournament results behind them garnering attention, they’re going to be hard to beat and even harder to get.

Here’s how Mike and Tracy Miller from Hermitage, Penn., turned their luck around using mini planer boards.

“Nothing was really working for us on the first two days,” Mike says. “It was cold, and the fish had gone deep. When the tournament switched lakes on day three, we found crappie staging in 4 feet of water along a shelf in clear water. We’ve done a good bit of walleye fishing using Offshore planer boards, and we happened to have contacted DeShano asking about a smaller version of the walleye boards. He sent us several pairs, and we had them with us.”

“There was no way we could get close to those fish without spooking, even using the longest rods we could find,” Mike continues. “We decided to run the boards out there across that shelf by pulling a double-jig setup with two 1/32-ounce jigs on each line. I’ll admit the boards take a little getting used to as far as setting up and getting fish in, but the bite was a no-brainer. The boards would wobble noticeably even when a small fish took the bait. A good fish would pull the boards down and backward, just like the walleyes do back home.”

The Millers maximized the use of the mini planer boards by setting their Humminbird to read 50 feet on each side of the boat. Then it was just a matter of getting the right depth and speed, and they were picking off the big prespawners.

Obviously, there’s more to talk about than I have room here, but Mike also told me he used a simple live minnow on a hook with great results — just like I’ve been telling people for years. Bruce is working on getting the mini planer boards out on the market but said it will take him some time. The best way to get them now is to contact your local Offshore Tackle dealer and have them order the mini planer boards for you. You can also read more about how to use planer boards and where to find a dealer at www.offshoretackle.com.

Phillip Gentry
pgentry6@bellsouth.net

The Undeniable Voice Of Experience

2009-01-16T11:27:00.000-08:00

As an aspiring crappie angler 20 years ago, I was enthralled after seeing a Bill Dance fishing show where his guest was a little-known Pickwick crappie guide named Roger Gant. Gant had developed a method of trolling that he called side pulling or simply pulling. Gant discovered the tactic one day during a fishing trip with his father when the two of them hung their crappie poles on the side of the boat and drifted while eating lunch. The pair caught fish after fish and changed forever the way Gant thought about and fished for crappie.

Gant still fishes sideways for crappie on Pickwick. Over time he has developed his tactic, which now accounts for a specific boat design offered by War Eagle Boats and a specially designed rod for B’n’M Poles. He and his brother Bill Gant guide almost 250 days out of the year. During a recent interview with Roger Gant, we discussed why he continues to side-troll even with the popularity of tight-lining and other trolling tactics.

“For one, with tight-lining there are so many rods in the water, it’s hard to tell when there’s a bite and which rod it’s on because there’s so much going on in the front of the boat,” Gant says. “I know it works and that a lot of tournament anglers do extremely well with it, but as a guide I have to show my clients a way to fish that’s both easy and fun to do.”

One tip that Gant offered for crappie anglers fishing this time of year is to forgo the use of a minnow on the end of a jig.

“Crappie bite light, light, light this time of year, and they also tend to short strike,” he says. “The jigs we make and use are 1/8-ounce hair jigs, and the hair only extends about a quarter of an inch beyond the hook. Any little bite we see on these sensitive rods is a fish we can catch, not a short strike that only gets the minnow.”

To learn more about Gant’s deadly side-pulling tactic, visit the B’n’M Poles website at www.bnmpoles.com or contact Roger Gant at Superpro Guide Service on Pickwick Lake at 731-689-5666.

Phillip Gentry
pgentry6@bellsouth.net

Is It Time To Start Spider-Rigging?

2009-01-06T09:25:00.000-08:00

That’s a funny question because to a lot of crappie fishermen the question is more like “When is it not the time to spider rig?” Maybe we should agree on what we’re talking about before we start talking about spider-rigging because the name of this tactic — which probably accounts for more crappie fish-fries than any other — can be a bit misleading.

If you’re a newcomer to the sport and you get out on your local lake and see a boat with rods sticking out in all directions, you’re going to assume that guy is spider-rigging. The name comes from the look of the boat from above — a big-bodied bug with a multitude of spindly legs sticking out in all directions.

The key to what the fisherman in the boat is doing is where his bait is located. If his bait is straight down in the water, directly under the rod tip, then he’s spider-rigging — assuming he has more rods than can be easily counted.

Over the years, true spider-rigging has given way to tight-line trolling. That’s due in part to local regulations that limit the number of rods per angler per boat. Anglers had to choose which three or four rods they wanted to keep and invariably chose the three out in front of the boat because those rods always caught the most fish anyway.

I couldn’t tell you who started the tight-line trolling craze, but I can tell you who made it famous — two guys from the Reelfoot Lake area in Tennessee — Ronnie Capps and Steve Coleman. They have their own rod design made by B’n’M Poles, and a commercially packaged version of their famous minnow rig is also offered through B’n’M for those who want to avoid the trouble of retying while on the water.

“This thing is so much simpler and quicker to tie on than starting from scratch,” said Capps. “There’s no measuring or fumbling around on a rocking boat. Just tie the line to the swivel, unroll it and you’re back in business.”

According to Capps and his partner Steve Coleman, the key to slow vertical trolling is putting the bait right in the fish’s face and being able to detect a bite from the often light-biting winter crappie.

“I want everything as still as possible,” said Capps. “There needs to be nothing to keep me from seeing that bite.”

So with crappie hanging out in the deepest depths of the year, is it time to start spider-rigging? Absolutely.

Phillip Gentry
pgentry6@bellsouth.net

Not Your Grandfather’s Jigging Spoon

2008-12-16T06:24:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-03T12:11:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-17T07:35:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-03T09:28:00.001-08:00

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

2008-10-14T07:08:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-14T06:43:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-09T12:14:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-09T12:09:00.000-07:00

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