Rainy Lake Far East Basin Crappies

Getting sick of winter…planning our annual trips to Rainy. Been going up to East Basin / Kettle Falls area for 10 years now…always around Memorial Day weekend. We never have trouble finding eater walleyes for camp and big pike for fun, but we’ve never been able to locate early season crappies in this area (US side).

For my sanity, has anyone??

I’m guessing the water temps are still too chilly to be able to find any crappies in back bays, but wanted to throw this out there to see if it’s worth a different approach this year (different staging areas to look for perhaps)…any suggestions much appreciated.

Cheers.

Z

From my experience on Namakan (upstream of kettle falls) the crappies head shallow immediately after ice out for a feed binge and then usually disappear until water reaches near 60° then return shallow for the spawn. A lot of the fish never leave those shallow bays all year, they just disappear into the weeds in summer.
The crappies up there are small populations, very easily over fished so if you find them please harvest selectively.
The hardest part about catching them up there is the massive amounts of good habitat the small schools of fish have to roam. Can you say needle in a haystack?