Part 2 Smith Mountain Crappie

After waiting for what seemed like months, I finally had time to get to Smith Mountain Lake to get at those slab size crappie! Though I was skeptical about the size of crappie that my friend Tony (Killer-Hog-Head) claimed to be catching, I knew that a lake of that size could hold slabs as big as he claimed.

We hit the lake at sun up. Now I know that most folks believe that you have to be on the water early, but I don’t subscribe to this point of view. Now there are exceptions. For example, I do believe that you can catch surface feeding fish at dawn and sun up. That’s another story. We were there at sun up because Killer-Hog-Head said that he caught his fish early. And, I wasn’t going to give him any reason (excuse) for not putting us on some slab size crappie.

It was a short ride from the ramp to slab crappie spot. I was just getting hunkered down good in the boat when we turned in to a cove. My first words were, “we have fished this area a hundred times and I’ve never seen a slab sized crappie come out of here.” Tony said “I know, but this is where we were catching them.” I started casting jigs towards the shore. However, I had one eye on Tony at all times to see what he fishing. The first thing I noticed was that he was rigging up a slip bobber to use minnows. Now I know minnows are good bait for crappie, but I like to think of them as the equivalent of putting on training wheels on a bike. Correction, I used to think of them that way.

As soon as he was rigged up, he started up the boat and headed us to the opposite side of the cove. I should have known that there was no way Killer-Hog-Head was going to put me on fish while he still had to rig up. I know he thought he was going to catch me without a slip bobber rig but he was wrong. I had one rod rig that way just incase I couldn’t get the jigs to do the trick.

He put us so close to shore, I could have jumped to shore with no problem. Tony’s bobber went under almost immediately. That one went 16 or 17 inches! I had a minnow under a float before he could get his fish in the live well. We worked that side of the cove for most of the morning. We caught just about a limit of slab size crappie! I did manage to get a few on jigs, but the majority of the fish were caught using minnows or minnas as Killer-hog-head calls them.

Since then, we learned how to find other coves that held the same size fish. I my next blog, I’ll tell you what type of coves we look for when we are fishing for slab size crappie in the spring.