Crappies are a North American freshwater fish species in the sunfish family. They have an excellent reputation for putting up a hard fight for their size and being extremely tasty. Many freshwater anglers consider them to be the best-tasting freshwater fish out there.
The crappie, also known as speckled perch, strawberry bass, white perch, and papermouth, has flaky white meat suitable for various delicious recipes.
Catch crappie by choosing your preferred method, looking for structure or deep over, then quietly presenting your bait. Jigs and minnows are often the best baits when fishing for crappie.
Because of the diverse diets of crappie, they can be caught in many different ways, making them an excellent species for almost any angler to experience using their favorite technique.
Crappie are mostly minnow eaters, and minnows hide around any kind of brush or weeds to avoid being eaten. The key to how to catch crappie is to focus on fishing wherever minnows hide. That also includes fallen trees, bushes, old piers, flooded weeds, or shoals covered with moss, plus wrecked boats, docks, and planted brushpiles. When these don’t pay off, try drifting with the wind or slow-trolling across a lake, plying a minnow at different depths until you cross paths with a school of roving crappie.
Small live minnows are popular crappie baits. Although crappie are infrequently caught on various plugs (occasionally on a surface lure or a crankbait), the one artificial that pays off regularly is a small leadhead jig with a soft-plastic body resembling a minnow. The trick is to fish this very slow. Jigs weighing from 1/64- to 1/16-ounce are often better than heavier ones, and this requires using light line.
Crappie anglers primarily use ultralight spinning or spincasting reels equipped with 4- or 6-pound-test line and 5- to 5 1/2-foot-long rods. Fly rods, telescoping fiberglass rods, and cane poles are popular as well.