Winter crappie fishing at Clinton Lake commenced in early January, nearly a month behind its traditional schedule.
Balmy late fall weather kept the water temperature unseasonably warm and the crappie scattered in small schools in a variety of wooded lairs in 10 to 20 feet of water.
In December, a couple of anglers had to work long and hard to hook 60 crappie, and it was rare feat to catch a dozen from one spot. Then winter arrived, sending area thermometers to as low as one degree above zero. By Jan. 5, ice covered nearly 70 percent of Clinton Lake, and many other waterways in northeast Kansas were iced over.
In winters past, when ice partially covered Clinton Lake, the bulk of the crappie moved to coverts under precariously thin ice where anglers couldn't go. But that wasn't the case on Jan. 5.
On that windless and relatively warm day, Pok-Chi Lau of Lawrence and I found large schools of crappie congregated along the submerged Wakarusa River channel. Here the edge of the channel was 30 feet deep, dropping into 45 feet of water in the heart of the river's basin.
Next to us were several other boats of crappie anglers, including Clyde Tryon and Ray Brooks, both of Perry, and Mike Smith and Ryan Anderson, both of Lawrence.
We all probed a two-mile stretch of the river channel. Along the channel edge, the crappie foraged upon small gizzard shad that were stationed around submerged stumps and trees near the channel's edge at around 28 to 35 feet. Some of the crappie were suspended in 18 feet of water and others were in 24 feet.
Along a 20-yard segment of the channel edge, Lau and I found a humongous school of crappie, shad and white bass.
At this spot, we used a spinning outfit spooled with eight-pond test monofilament and sporting a quarter-ounce jighead dressed with a red-and-chartreuse Bailey Magnet.
The most crucial element in wintertime crappie fishing especially when the crappie are suspended many feet off the bottom is placing the jig at the correct depth. To accomplish that task time after time, we used a black permanent-ink marker to mark our lines at the appropriate depths of 18 and 24 feet.
Sometimes the crappie wanted the jig held perfectly still. At other times, they wanted us to shake the jig subtly. Then there were spells when they wanted it dropping vertically, but there were also periods when they preferred to have it slowly swimming horizontally.
For a short time, they liked to have the jig pitched about 24 feet and have it slowly fall at a 45-degree angle from the surface towards the bottom, and they would engulf the jig as it dropped into 20 feet of water.
By working our jigs and Bailey Magnets in a variety of ways, Lau and I caught and released 103 crappie and nine white bass in about three hours, all from this 20-yard area.
Such a catch was a sure sign that the traditional winter bonanza had begun. Smith and Anderson seconded the notion by reporting that in a week's time the size of the crappie schools increased more than twenty-fold.
Because the schools are so big and easy to find, Smith also noted that wintertime crappie are extremely vulnerable.
For instance, he believes that about 30 unthinking anglers can virtually destroy this bonanza in a week or two by killing 1,500 crappie in a day. But if they released 1,200 or more of them, the fishing could remain bountiful until the water temperature hits 44 degrees in late winter and the crappie scatter.
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