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Hope you had a chance to hit the water last weekend and snatch a few Thank you for reading Target Crappie – we appreciate you. Some good juice in this one, hope you enjoy it!

How Jason and Caleb got the W at Truman, MO

We caught up with Jason Musgrave (left) after he and Caleb Baker mopped 'em up on the Truman Lake, MO Crappie Masters event last weekend. They won big fish too with a 3.14-lb mongo slab! 🤯 Here's how they did it:

> "2 years back I fished [Truman] around this time and stumbled on a spot holding some fish. It’s a well-known area – the Grand Army. It’s got all a crappie could ask for: a massive flat with ditches, trees and pockets of deeper water....

> "I went there at the end [of practice] fished it a couple hours and caught some decent fish...decided I'm just gonna start in there and just try to cover water. I felt like my best option was to fish that channel...I was really the only one [in the area] that was fishing that type of pattern.

> "That that lake is full of 1-lb pound fish so you have to find a kicker to separate yourselves [in the tournament]...Truman has some freak [black/white crappie] hybrids too. If you're lucky enough to hook 1 or 2, it's pretty much a guaranteed win.

> "I caught a 1.60 and a 1.90 hybrid so I thought that I'd already caught my kicker...I was panning through the channel at about 2.5 mph and I kept seeing this fish out there.

> "...I almost passed it up [but] I kept my eye on it...as it got closer, I threw my brakes on and started zooming in. I dropped the bait down on that on that mark and [the fish] did that little flutter and nosed up. And I thought 'oh, boy...that's a really good fish.'

> "It just came up and bit like it was supposed to...so I set the hook and brought it up. When it broke the surface I just about lost it. I finally got a net underneath it, got it in the boat, put a tag and a belly weight on it....

> "...I said, 'I just won this tournament. Now I gotta keep this thing alive all day.'

> "I actually had 7.79 on my scale at 7:30am and I ended up with 8 lbs even which was huge on that lake."

Why did you decide that you needed to go out in that main creek channel?

> "It was hot, real hot. I just felt like that there was that water was a little cooler in that channel.

> "They were a little deeper – some fish 18' down and they were probably just running through there just trying to hit those little cool pockets.

> "The fish that were on that flat were down in the mud trying to stay a little cooler and they're just harder to see. If I could find them in that in that deeper water...they were going to be a lot easier to catch.

> "I was hoping Saturday [day 2] that some more fish would move in [the channel] and they really didn't – I had to go onto the flat and just go cover water."

Jason mentioned that most of his day 1 weight along with the 3-lber came in 1 area of that channel:

> "It was [special] because it had it had a flat on the right side of the of the channel. It had that deep water because a crappie likes to be next to both – they like to go back and forth.

> "On the other side of it had probably a football length field full of standing timber – they've got everything they want right there."

How they caught 'em

> "I found really something that they that I felt like they really liked more – a Crappie Magnet [tiny dancer] in 'shonuff' and 'chartreuse'.

> "I had them on a 1/4-oz jig, and I just pitched it out there. I would try to just swim it by them real slow."

He also did the same thing with a 1/32-oz hand-tied WhiteTrash Custom Jigs hair jig with a 1/4 weight pegged above it.

Jason's setup

Crappie magnet [tiny dancer] in 'shonuff' and 'chartreuse' – or a 1/32-oz WhiteTrash Custom Jigs hair jig (pink, white, chartreuse) with a pegged 1/4-oz egg sinker, 12-lb Seaguar InvizX flouro, Pflueger President XT Spinning Reel, 15' Power Crappie Todd Huckabee Ghost Rod.

3 Qs with the 3-lb slab snatcher!

Gotcha a few more Qs with Jason for some more 🧃!

How do you get the right angles on fish to present the bait the right way?

> "That's all just kind of muscle memory – I don't have to really look at that trolling motor much anymore.

> "Most of the time I'm looking at the [rod] tip because I know where it's at. If [the fish] is behind me, then I'll have the butt facing in line with the trolling motor."

What do you do to kind of stay up on your game so you can compete at that level? [Jason runs his own flooring business full-time.]

> "I think [just being] out there. I also have to have a good day to really sharpen up and build that muscle memory.

> I have to train my eyes to know 'that's a 1-lb fish, that's a 1.30, that's a 1.40...' That's the kind of thing I have to constantly go and sharpen back up on."

Do you think going to new bodies of water with an open mind gives you an advantage over locals?

> "I do because [locals] are there all [the time]. They've got 100 different spots to go to – you can imagine what's going through their head the night before.

> "...I studied some places and stuff that would kind of fit the same pattern that [locals would be fishing]. They just didn't have tournament-grade fish in 'em.

> "There's just certain areas of the lake that produced good last the last 2 times I've been up there [that aren't as popular as community hole stuff]. If I fished another tournament up there next weekend, that's exactly what I would go do."

"The slabs are by the river channel"

That's Target Crappie's Brett Jolley talkin' about how some 🧃 that he got from Wally Marshall has been helping him stay on slabs – like that one from Sam Rayburn Rez, TX.

Brett has been guiding on Sam Rayburnand has been adjusting to the fish movements week by week. Here's how he's staying on 'em as it gets tougher into the summer:

> "It seems like in May there was a big push of 8-9 inch fish that pushed out offshore to the brushpiles. That typically happens out here when you start getting those days in the high 80s, low 90s.

> "As obvious as it sounds, something that has been so key for me for staying on bigger fish is something Wally Marshall told me in an interview for a recent Target Crappie email:

Look at your map, and see where the creek channels are running. Then you get on those creek channels and you got that standing timber or them stumps...I don't care if it's 5 or 6' deep, those fish get on 'em.

> "He was talking about how cover next to creek channels will always relaod and have fresh fish, and that's what I've started looking for when I'm guiding.

> "That's exactly what I did last weekend when my normal stuff wasn't paying off. I remembered that quote and started running old waypoints that I thought would have fresh fish. Not only did we catch more, but we got away from the 8-9 inch fish and aroung the 12-14 inch fish.

> "Our main deal was brushpiles in 15-20' on the edges of big flats where the main river channel would swing up against it. It was kind of an ultra-specific deal, but once we got on that it changed the day.

> "When we started running those river channel-oriented piles, they bit way easier and were slabs – so I knew we were seeing fresh fish.

> "A bonus deal from that day was that if you could find older piles that didn't have many branches [like the one below👇] on them, that's where we did our damage on the giant ones."

How he caught 'em

> "We were casting the whole time and just had live minnows nose-hooked on the jighead. ...sitting 5-20' off of the brushpiles and casting past 'em, and watching that jig pendulum back over the piles.

> "Sometimes you could work a fish out of a pile by reeling it up and giving the jig micro shakes. But all 3 of us would just get a feel for how long it took for our jigs to fall to the pile and just slow reel it back.

> "If you were at the right depth and matched the speed of that pendulum with how fast (or slow) you were reeling, you were going to get bit."

An interesting bait deal

> "1 clients brought his own 3" Berkley Gulp! Minnows in 'green shiner' and 'chartreuse shad' and dangit if he didn't just about out-fish us on at least a third of the piles.

> "Typically I go small in the summer and big in the winter, but they wanted nothing to do with small plastics and the small minnows would just catch you 9.75-inch fish.

> "He started catching 'em so good on that 3-inch Gulp! that I started rummaging around the minnow bucket to find bigger ones for my other client, and sure enough they were both consistently putting keepers in the boat."

Brett's setup: 1/16-oz Big Bite Baits Jig Sickle (black/white), #5 splitshot, 12-lb Seaguar InvizX flouro leader, 10-lb Berkley Forward Braid (flame green), Kistler Chromium Spinning Reel, 6' 9" ML Kistler Jig Head Minnow Rod.

Micro-fact or Micro-Fiction? 🤔

6th Sense unveiled it's new slab candy – the 1.5" Micro Fiction – so we got with Matt Adams to get some intel on it. He says ‘Bama shad-eaters can’t get enough of it:

> "There's a little ball on the end of the tail [that] gives it a little bit of an up and down kick. Some of these post-spawn, finicky, high-pressured fish will eat that subtle bait a little bit better right now. The body stays still but the tail kick gives them a different look.

> "It's a little bit smaller profile [and more subtle] than some of the other [crappie] baits 6th Sense offers like the Clobber Minnow.

> "There's a lot more colors with the Micro-Fiction than what's in the Clobber Minnow. I'm a big fan of both, but as far as for the finicky, pressured fish, the Micro-Fiction really does a good job getting them to bite when more aggressive or larger profiles won't [trigger them]."

Matt said he's fished it the past couple months for pressured post-spawners:

> "Now that the weather's gotten nice, everybody's getting their boat out and going fishing. The fish are a little bit more pressured, and it's a great time to use it around timber. 

> "I've got a tree right now with a couple-hundred fish on it...you can catch 10 or 12 pretty fast [on more aggressive baits]. ...when they slow down, that's usually when I'll drop the Micro-Fiction down and pluck a few more out of the school.

> "It seems like they'll come up and follow it longer [than larger baits] before they eat it. The hardest part is keeping the spotted bass from eating it – they they love that little thing...and there's a lot of them hanging with the crappie right now around balls of threadfin shad."

FYI Matt likes it on a 1/32- or 1/16-oz jighead with 4- to 8-lb line.

Crappies stay home in the summer?

Interesting deal from an In-Fisherman post – kind of a "keep it simple" thing for finding crappies now:

> A month or 2 after spawning and well into summer, the mistake I’ve often made is to run to other parts of the lake in search of the very same crappies. ...I finally figured out the fish hadn’t moved more than a football field from their early spring haunts.

> By no means am I saying you can fish this [way] every day all summer and find crappies there. Or that the pattern works on all lakes. Certain days the crappies simply seem to vanish. But a few days to a week later, at least a portion of the population is often back home again.

> The stay-at-home tendencies of crappies might not apply perfectly to all lakes, particularly large lakes, where crappies might move a mile or more from their spawning sites. In rivers and flowing reservoirs, it might not seem to apply at all.

> But if you examine available habitat on a broad scale, you often find that summer crappie location simply reflects the best available habitat, such as the first main-lake flat topped with clumps of cabbage outside a spawning bay, or brushpiles at the mouth of a secondary creek arm.

> ...the stay-at-home inclinations of crappies applies more often than you’d think – which is why when we hit new lakes in summer, the best approach to finding fish is to begin at likely spawning areas and work outward and slightly deeper from there.

> In larger spawning bays or lakes within large lakes, crappies may not leave those locales all year long.

> ...we often...troll small crankbaits or curly-tail grubs along the outside edge of the vegetation or the primary dropoff. While trolling, we often encounter little crappie pods of a dozen or more fish suspended.... We’ll stop and drop Slab Raps or little jigging spoons....

1. Chase Petty wins KY Lake Crappie Fishing Series

Chase said he winged it and found his winning fish mid-morning. Hit the scales with 7 weighing 11.53 lbs:

> All fish were caught with the 13' Power Crappie LLC Home of Todd Huckabee Rods Trident, and ATX Lure Company tungsten heads/ bodies.

2. TN/KY: How KY Lake anglers are catching 'em

> Decent stringers of crappie targeting depths of 12-15' while using live minnows and a mixture of jigs.

3. SC: Murray slabs are going nuts…

From Snap Hunter's Guide Service: 

> A great day on the water with my son, Cade, Scopin' brushpiles with the Catch The Fever 8' precision casting rods and 4-lb Slime Line Fishing Line. We caught over 60 crappie and had our 2 limits [by] 10:15am.

4. MN: Crappie are biting well in some places

> Brainerd/Nisswa area: The 8-12' weeds are holding crappies and bluegills on Nisswa Lake, Cullen Lake, Lake Edward and North Long.

> Fairmont area: Crappies are going in 8 to 10' on Hall, Budd and Lake Sisseton.

> Rainy Lake: Crappie are slow but long-lining a spinner and minnow over 10-15' in the bays should produce some fish.

5. IA: How to catch 'em at 3 lakes

> Brushy Creek Lake: Water clarity is about 5'. Find crappie near shore in 5-10' of water near submerged structure. 

> East Okoboji Lake: Water temperatures are in the upper 60s. Black crappie are good.

> Rathbun Rez: Try small jigs or jigs under a slip bobber. Use minnows if the crappie get picky.

Also the DNR is relaxing fishing regs at Cold Springs Lake, says catch and keep them all. Relaxed regs took effect Jun 15:

> The DNR will lower the lake water level starting Aug 1 to prepare for the renovation project aimed to improve the poor size structure of largemouth bass and bluegill and increase near-shore habitat.

6. OH's East Fork Lake reportedly good for crappies

7. BaitFuel 2.0 is coming 👀

Outed by pro bass fisherman Justin Hamner. Said it's "way stickier and lasts a lot longer on baits."

8. Garmin has a new ultra-wide 15" screen 

Post says 74% wider than standard 9" screen. Looks cool but it's...$4,500! 😢

How to side-image for crappie

Good stuff from the folks at Angling Buzz:

They're talking spring, but it's solid info whenever you're trying to find crappie that have moved or aren't locked up on structure yet – or you're fishing a lake without much bottom structure:

> ...driving around at about 2 mph and searching for these fish with side imaging. These schools of fish really stand out on the side imaging if you set it up correctly.

> For a stronger and more defined image of the fish, I only have the side imaging range set to 50' out. If you have the range set for too far out, the fish will be too small to see.

> When I’m driving around you just want to look for those hot spots that look like white grains of rice, with a shadow behind them. Those are fish and if they have a shadow they are generally fish that are off the bottom.

> It will take a little getting used to, but once you know what you're looking for the schools of fish will really stand out.

> Once you find a decent school of fish mark the spot with a waypoint. Then slide out about 20-30' away from the school and cast into it.

> ...I like using a bobber setup so you are able to keep your bait in front of the fish for an extended period of time.

The Target Crappie team ran across this on Hood Fishing Entertainment's Facebook – looks like he nailed it! 🤣

Here's a SLAB for ya from Bobby Garland's Facebook! That tub was caught on a 'monkey milk'-color Original Baby Shad. We looked it up and a 24-pack of water bottles is – 15.22" long! 🤯

National Professional Anglers Assoc.

MN-FISH