Under one of your floats or just cast and retrieve?
The water temp was hardly 42 degrees so the fish will be very depth specific and I used on of my floats to stay in about 5 1/2 feet. Water depth was about 17 feet. There’s some buried structure on this spot and the fish were holding just off it at the depth mentioned. Deeper or shallower and nothing.
And Gim, the Mississippi is full of crappies of that size. Both of them today had several shad about 4″ in their stomachs. Last fall the same sized fish had 3″ shad in them lol. Things grow over the winter I guess. If I want to see crappies in the 14-15 inch range during the summer months, I head right to pool 5. Maybe lower pool 4. I believe the crappies we took today are transitioning from the winter haunts to the early pre-spawn locations and that accounts for the two chunk in with lesser fish. As a rule, those big crappies are almost solitary and will avoid mixing with lesser fish. If you know there are large crappies in the water and you’re catching smaller fish, move and change tactics because those chunks are a world apart from the smaller ones.
One of those 14″ers laid in the 5 gallon pail with water up about halfway and its nose was on one side the tail touching the other.
The other fish that were dressed out had the usual bug crap in the guts. I’m assuming that seeing the minnow bait was more than they’ve had their chops around for several months, hence the strong bite today.
I toyed with the idea of going back tomorrow but the weather and wind reports aren’t favorable.