Spring's emergence lures big crappies, anglers to shallows

NISSWA, MINN.

For many Minnesotans the spring season means Twins baseball, blooming flowers and road construction.

To others spring signals crappie fishing. It's a time when lake waters have warmed sufficiently enough to summon the silvery panfish to shallow water, procreation on their minds. The male crappies darken significantly, and the more silvery females are fat with eggs.

Last week Rolf Moen of Nisswa, Minn., and I followed the crappies, as we do each spring.

It was early evening when we dropped anchor just outside a bed of hard-stem bulrushes. The green whips that had grown tall last summer were now brown and broken, stubs if you will, some extending 6 inches or so above the water, others broken off just below the water's surface. The lake bottom was a mix of sand and rocks.

Just the place crappies gather to spawn.

Rolf and I were similarly outfitted. We each employed small spinning reels loaded with 4-pound test line, and ultralight rods. On the business end of our lines we tied tiny, 1/64th-ounce jigs onto which we threaded small, white Puddle Jumpers, a soft plastic lure that spirals as it falls. The lures are made to simulate an injured minnow. Next we added a crappie minnow hooked through the lips. The combinations were suspended below bobbers.

It didn't take long to confirm our suspicions. Within minutes Rolf's bobber went down, and he set the hook into the first crappie of the day.

"It's a nice fish," Rolf said as he hoisted the fish aboard, "but not the size we are looking for." He unhooked the fish and tossed it back into the lake.

In past years, in this very same bulrush patch, Rolf and I have caught a number of crappies measuring 13 inches. North or south, that's a big crappie.

During the next half-hour or so, we each caught several crappies similar in size to Rolf's initial catch. All were released.

Throughout our evening of fishing we were constantly flanked by a pair of lovesick red-necked grebes. The loon-shaped grebes are handsome, sporting rust-colored necks and white cheek patches below a black cap. Colorful as they are, red-necked grebes are known mostly for their raucous courting calls. It's obnoxious to some people, but Rolf and I appreciate the noisy birds as an audio symbol of good times on the water.

We fished up and down the bed of bulrushes, but nearly all of the crappies we caught came from a small area about 30 yards in diameter. Why the fish chose to hold in that location we could not discern.

With the sun perched on the western horizon, wispy clouds glowing yellow and orange, the bite picked up, and we hauled in a crappie every five minutes or so.

When the cooler contained enough crappies for meal, we headed for shore, wave tops glowing orange, the end to a perfect spring evening.