Wissota crappies grouping up for fall

Late summer marks the season when I start running into significant schools of Wissota crappies. I tend to lose track of the specks once the spring rituals are finished (although I haven’t spent a ton of time following them), and am happy to see them once again as fall draws closer.

Now that our water temps are starting to slide towards the 60s, I’ve been encountering schools of Wissota crappies with regularity. Although nearly all of my boat time has been dedicated to preparing for the upcoming FLW walleye league finals, I did take an hour out of my day today to pattern some crappies. It was time well spent!

Here’s a quick pic to show you the quality of crappies Wissota has to offer. Both of these specks were between 11 and 12″, a size class that is incredibly abundant in the backyard gem. I was able to land a half-dozen representatives of this size class during my crappie break today, and lost a few others on their way to the boat (that hard walleye hook set isn’t often necessary for ol’ papermouth ). They are so much fun, and so broad-shouldered with fall approaching, that I wish I could have spent more time with them. They’d make for a fun outing with the kids, that’s for sure!

Great looking crappies Jason…good luck in the big events.

Nice wissota specks, didnt happen to get them off the small lake did you Jason??? 8 of them will make for some big weights this winter
Good luck in the walleye tournament
Mat
P.S any SI images of those schooling crappies

Here’s one shot. The crappies are the ball of white returns in the dark blue stripe that’s on the right of this image.

Nice fish !!

Jason,

Nice fish!! When you were targeting these fish, did you try to locate the schools with the SI and then target those fish? Or were you targeting other structure such as cribs, if so, could you mark the many fish around cribs with the SI.

Thanks!!
Tim

I found fish one of two ways.

1. I either blindly stumbled on crappies while fishing walleyes (low percentage!)

2. I found schools with my Humminbird Side Imaging unit, and fished those schools “on purpose” (high percentage!).

These were not crib fish.

More information to come! Look for a thread in the Humminbird forum shortly.

Here’s some additional information:

Using Humminbird Side Imaging sonar to target fall crappies