If you’re looking for somewhere about an hour away from the metro, the mississippi river in the st.cloud area has a lot of flooded back waters that I have pulled big small mouth out of. Ive noticed that the small mouth have been in thick sticks in super shallow water. Casting tubes or x-raps really slow have been key right now.

We found a lot of crappies, a couple of eater bluegills ,and a few pike. This 14 incher is the nicest one we found! we were set up in about 17 feet of water fishing in the middle of the day about 3-6 feet off the bottom. We had most of our luck fishing with the tungsten heavy metal jigs, forage minnow spoons and crappie minnows on a dead stick. Gotta love those small lakes that no one fishes!

Its always good to let the monsters go back, the nice things about small private lakes is that they dont get fished as much and can hide some big panfish.

I guess this summer there were some crappies up to 15 inches taken out of it. I’m not sure if there was a winter kill in the last 5-10 years. There use to be nice pike in the lake but they were thinned out, and that might be why the crappies started to come back.

Ill give it a try I’ve never fished it before, any favorite overall plastics?

Thanks a lot for the tip! ill give it a shot.

14″ Mississippi river crappie!