Spring Crappie Bite in Alexandria, MN

Well, Spring is here and the ice is breaking up at a very fast pace in the Alexandria area. I was ice fishing not two days ago, and last night I figured just maybe I could get out on the ice one last time. I drove around to a number of lakes only to find large cracks and extremely rotten ice. It’s amazing to see the power of the sun this time of year! It made very fast work of the fishable ice we recently had. After I admitted to myself the ice season was over, I decided to switch gears. It was just too nice of a night to not spend fishing, so I ran home to pick up a few of my favorite crappie poles. On the way I got a call from a college buddy of mine Joel, that lives nearby. After picking him up, we were on our way.

Here in Alexandria we are blessed with such a wide variety of lakes. Some lakes are only a few feet deep, where other exceed well over a hundred feet in depth. This gives us the benefit of having lakes that are on completely different time schedules. While some lakes are just letting go of their ice, others are mostly ice free. With this in mind I planned to target areas with shallow black bottom bays and moving water. It seems these areas are the first to draw in fish close to shore, making it easy for even you shoreline anglers to get into some great fishing.

Once Joel and I arrived at our destination, it didn’t take but a couple casts to find some hungry crappies. The first one was a nice healthy 12 1/2” fish. We were using your standard crappie set up, a light rod and reel with 4lb test. For a lure, we used a 1/32oz tube jig in red. I set the jig about 1 ½ feet below a small bobber, tipped with a crappie minnow. After perfecting our presentation the bite was on and the fish were very nice! The hardest part about fishing this particular evening was finding fish small enough to keep. Personally I like to keep the smaller fish in the 10-11” range and let the larger ones go. The fish averaged 12” with a handful of them exceeding the 13” mark.

If you were one of the few planning on one last ice trip this weekend, I’d plan on leaving the ice gear at home and bring your favorite crappie rod. The spots to fish are abundant and if you have a handheld GPS with a LakeMaster chip, finding these spots won’t take you long. As Bob Bowman’s report stated, this is one of the best times of the year to introduce kids to fishing. The action is fast and the gear needed for a productive outing is minimal. Careful, because you could quite possibly end up with a kid that won’t play his video games and will be bugging you constantly to go fishing!