Open water suspended crappies

Hey guys,

Much of my time spent crappie fishing focuses on fishing directly in or on brush piles. However as you know, sometimes the fish are scattered and suspended over deep (30+ FOW) with no relation to any real structure.

I’m curious to know how other anglers tackle these roaming groups of fish. Do you try to hold in one spot and wait for them to swim by? Do you slow troll big jigs? Go fish something else? It can be a short-lived effort for me when I’m not seeing fish and not over structure.

Thanks in advance. Good luck and be safe out there.

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Looks like you are fishing from a boat so I’m going to assume you’re not talking about ice fishing.
From my boat, I would motor around the deeper, open water searching for schools of crappies with my down and side scan. Once found, plop down a couple waypoints and then spot lock on top of them so that I could fish vertically.
If a school moves on, you do the same. Go find another school and repeat.

Side imaging…
Not much else finds open water schools faster

Thanks, Joel. Yeah I was referring to fishing out of a boat. I could have made that more clear. That sounds like a good strategy. I know it’s not the most complicated task but I was curious to see how others do it.

Best of luck to you this season.

Yes, the side imaging is fantastic isn’t it?! I’m lucky to have a friend with it. Definitely a game changer.

I typically only fish them in the winter (on ice) and will keep moving until I mark them. Same philosophy would apply in open water I’d assume!

p.s. Nice meeting you guys at the IDO Gtg, glad you found some eye’s before leaving!

Hey thanks for the tip, BigWerm! I figured this would be the answer I’d get but I wanted to ask and see.

Nice meeting you too! The GTG was a great time. Super happy we were fortunate enough to catch a few fish but even if we hadn’t I still would’ve had a blast. I’m having withdrawals big time. Next time I’ll have to spend more than just three days there though. It wasn’t enough time. Hope your season has been good to you so far. Be safe and best of luck.

When I find crappies that are scattered and not really related to any hard structure. I break out my small crank baits and troll with electric motor. I usually keep the speed ( or rather my terrova does ) at 1-1.5 mph. If that doesn’t start producing go either slightly slower or faster.

Some guys favor the little bigger crank baits up to 3-1/2 inch. They do catch fish but I favor the 2 inch and under. I also have used the lipless cranks like the slab rap and rippin rap. They can be super deadly on the right day.

Here in Ohio , other than spawning, I find the somewhere between the 12-22 foot zone. This technique is not a numbers game but the quality seems pretty consistent.

In a couple local waters crappies are pretty good at scattering over deep water but they’ll hang in fairly specific water depth in the column….say the water is 33 feet deep and the crappies suspending at 7 down to 10 feet. Many will just drift with the wind across the deep areas with jigs/plastics or jig/minnows. I have a box of micro cranks I’ll break out and tie on over a drop shot weight to drift/troll over the deep water to find action. I’ll also do the jig/plastic.

Suspended crappies in the boat.. I have done what papaperch does and have had good luck with a small red/white daredevl… seems weird but they hammered it trolling slowly.

I started working on vertically jigging suspended crappies this past Summer and found good success using the smallest size (can’t remember the number) jigging raps. The hardest part a lot of the time seems to be finding the school. Once you’re over them you can pick a few/a lot pretty easily.

In summer, I’ll search 30+’ depths immediately outside a weed edge with small cranks and once found, I switch to a small jig/plastic and cast. I should add too that the fish are usually in the top 1/3 of the water column. Once you find them you’ll often have action for quite some time.

My FIL showed me this tactic many years ago, I had a hard time believing and understanding why the fish were in the middle of the lake with no structure around and nowhere near the bottom. Walleye guy I guess!

ET