Where do I begin? Tennessee? Alabama? We were on a crappie mission. Two months ago Marshal drove down to southern Alabama and caught many 13-15″ crappies in the Alabama river. Figuring that this past week would be one of the best weeks to be down there in slab heaven, we loaded up the truck and boat, and headed south…and I mean SOUTH!
We hit the road Tuesday night late, and drove through Missouri, Arkansas, Mississippi, and arrived in Alabama late morning Wednesday. We fished in the southern Alabama river for a day and a half, with little to show for our efforts. We tried casting in the shallow bays, vertical jigging out in deeper water in the main channel. Everything we tried did not work. We gave up on southern Alabama and decided to head north, to “world famous” crappie capitol Weiss Lake. Having never fished this 30,00 acre body of water before, we opted to hire a guide.
The guide took us out for half a day, and to make a long story short, we ended up trying to pay him and his response was ” I don’t expect anybody to pay for that type of fishing”.
Basically what we learned is that, the fish down there didn’t know it was spring. They had a major warm up down there, and then a major cold front move through with lots of rain, and it really confused the fish. Every where in the south we went, we ran into the same conditions, the fish were not biting for us.
We then moved to our east to Tennessee and tried fishing one of my favorite smallmouth spots, Little River. Where three years ago, I managed to do extremely well on smallmouth. Here is a link to that report.
Well, we ran into the same conditions there, slow fish, shocked by the weather patterns.
And this point our pride was pretty bruised, and our spirits were down. We decided to tuck tale and head home, in a last ditch effort to save the trip by fishing the Coralville Res.
The Reservoir closest to home, ended up saving our trip and our week. We rigged ourselves up with 1/16 ounce precision jig heads from B Fish N Tackle, paired with different crappie plastics, and hit the water. We found the majority of our fish in 7-15 FOW. Water temps were averaging 58. And these fish are in the pre spawn stage, and are very spread out. The reservoir did not disappoint us, as we were able to boat a nice mess of beautiful Iowa crappies.
I am sure we will be back to Weiss lake soon, when you see mounted 4 lbs crappies, you get an itch really bad to catch them, especially when an accomplished guide tells you they normally throw back 14″ inch slabs for bigger fish!!
But with that in mind, sometimes we all too often over look the water in our own back yards, and our back yard gems sometimes save our pride and our fishing trips!!
Marshal, Tyler, and Keith, it was great sharing the laughs and the miles on the road with you guys- Thanks for the invite! Hopefully the sweet tea, and the crappies will treat us better on our next run down south!
Stay safe, Good luck, and we’ll see you on the water!
Nice R&F. No place like home!
Great job Luke, you sure made the best of it.
I’d like to know how many trips I’ve had bad luck on only to come home to a good bite 
Nice read and pics
Sounds like a great trip, non the less!
Great job Luke!
Now that’s a road trip Luke, Glad you could get something going. There’s no place like home. LOL
Luke,
Nice “White” Crappies.
Tough bite? There seems to be a lot of that going around this spring. Sorry about your luck guys!
Some pretty darn nice crappies you pulled out of the local waters though. Nic pics!
Nice specks
We’ve done that..traveled the country, just to find out
they’re right in the backyard!! But the trip is half the fun of fishing together!!
Nice report Luke!
Nice report, and great pictures!!
I just have one question… For the two pictures that are labeled as white crappies… I’m pretty sure those are black crappies…. In the picture with Mr. Yanda, he is holding up a black crappie in HIS RIGHT hand (the bigger fish), and a white crappie in HIS LEFT (the smaller fish)… The whites have more vertical bar markings while the blacks have more irregular dark spots. The two pics labeled white crappies definately look like black crappies to me… But maybe I’m wrong?
Sometimes whites and blacks get confused because male crappies tend to get much darker around the spawn due to hormonal changes, although they are much lighter colored at other times of the year…. So often people think of really dark crappies as “black” crappies and lighter shaded crappies as white crappies. The main identifier should be irregular dark specks (black crappies) vs dark specks in a vertical bar pattern (white crappies) (among other identifiers) – and not so much the overall darkness of the fish compared to other fish…
I believe I’m correct on this, but can someone enlighten us further??
Otherwise, thanks for sharing you report, nice work!! 
Whittsend
I talked to my buddy, who is a fisheries technician for the Iowa DNR- He agreed the bigger ones are black crappies.
He said, “Count Dorsal spines. 5 or 6 on a white. 7 or 8 on a black.”….or maybe it is the other way around?
Who knows, but I do think you are right the big one in marshal’s hand could be a black, the smaller one in his other hand is for sure a white-
Right on regarding the spines – generally white crappies can have 5-7 spines, and black crappies 7 or 8… Coloring can be very similar during the spawn (due to darkening of the males), and they can be harder to tell apart at that time – But I think that general vertical bars / no bars is usually a good indicator.. Of course, there can also be hybrids between white and black crappies, and that could muddy the waters a little.. But those two look exactly like the black crappies that I have caught in the past… We don’t have too many white crappies in WI (castle rock and a handful of other lakes have a few white crappies) – mostly just black crappies though – but the white crappies that I have caught definately had those vertical bars like the smaller white crappie in the photo…
Either way, I’d love to get into some crappies like those!!
Mike