Cribs or Basin for Crappie

Just curious on this subject. There are a few lakes in my general area that are clear (see bottom in 15 fow) that have nice crappie in them. The lakes are less then 200 acres but run up to 80′ deep. I know that the crappie will use the cribs in this lake but are very tight lipped do to fishing pressure. I can see them on my Marcum camera but have little interest in anything I drop down. The crappie around the cribs are scattered around but there is not an abundance of them. Do you believe that the crappies use the basin in the lake as well as the cribs. I caught some nice crappie here in the fall (cpr’d) and would like to catch them this winter. There is a weed line that starts around 8′ to 10′ and goes to about 15′ to 18′. I am willing to drill holes to start looking but just want a few opinions. Thanks

Kim

I would defiantly spend a little time exploring the basin looking for schools. I have had a lot more success finding and catching basin crappies in deeper clear lakes than I have fishing cribs in the same lakes.

Would you also try a night bite for these clear lake crappie? Looks like I will sharpen the blade on the auger and drill some holes.

I’d certainly consider looking at low light periods. The last hour of light and the first couple hours of dark can be good fishing where the clear water has crappies tentative. The last couple hours of dark prior to sunrise can be equally good and in some cases the fish can peak in the dead middle of night Clear water can also make any insect emergence from the bottom very. very specific to low light periods. Noise related to humans drops off considerably after dark which will help too unless there is heavy snowmobile/vehicle traffic.

Absolutely try night time, we fish a lake at night that has a lot of pressure during the day and has clear water.

We generally fish it from midnight until around 5:30 AM. We try to be gone before the early morning guys come on and see us leaving. We mainly fish Tip Downs and have a blast running our butts off. Every lake is different and you may have to start just before sunset and fish all night to get on their pattern.

We fish the weedline and openings in the cabbage about 12 to 16 feet max depth.

This might be the same lake in this first video.

Here is a little video, it is not us fishing but a good example.

I’d give the basin a fair shot. My experience is often (not always, but often) basin fish are fairly agreeable and willing to bite. I’ve seen fish on cribs get really spooky too, even when not heavily pressured. Sometimes I wonder if it’s due to the amount of predators we also see on the camera while fishing cribs.

Nothing better than finding a 10′ thick school of crappies over 40+ feet of water. Hopefully they are less than 25 feet down though or I don’t do much catch and release due to difficulty sending them back from deep water.