Secrets to Shallow Water Crappie by John E. Phillips
Day 4: John Holley Explains How to Take Big Crappie with Brute Force
Editor’s Note: All crappie anglers know that during the spring, crappie move into shallow-water bays to spawn. Spawning activity generally takes place in extremely-shallow bays and creeks with plenty of brush in them. However, most crappie fishermen fish these regions from boats and fish the outer edges of the cover – usually the deepest part of the water.
 Regardless of how much you enjoy fishing for crappie with minnows, during the spring of the year, when the crappie move into shallow water, always carry at least two or three packs of jigs with you. You never know when someone may kick-over the minnow bucket, or the minnows may die. “I’ll grab a box of crappie hooks, you get some minnows, and we’ll go catch us a mess of crappie,” John Holley of Linden, Alabama, would tell me.  I fished for 4 years with Holley, one of the best crappie fishermen ever on the Tombigbee River in west Alabama. Holley explained that, “If you want to catch big crappie, get prepared to lose your hooks, because you have to put your baits in places where no-other crappie fishermen will put their baits.” We fished with 20-pound-test line and 13-foot-long cane poles. Then we broke the poles off to make each about 10-feet long. Each stiff pole resembled a pool cue. We used quills for our floats. Before we ever lip-hooked our minnows, we’d bend our wire hooks straight and then re-bend them, so if the hooks hung-up in wood, they would easily and quickly straighten-out.
 “Thread your minnow down through the thickest tree top, brush or weeds that you can find near the bank in shallow water,” Holley said. “You want to put that minnow down in that brush where nobody will fish. Once you get a crappie to bite and the hook set, then we’ll begin to worry about how to get that crappie out of that brush.” Using this tactic in the spring of the year, Holley and I caught bigger crappie than anyone else I knew. Holley also would fish areas that no other crappie anglers could reach.  We generally wore old blue jeans or shorts and old tennis shoes when we went crappie fishing in the spring, because we’d often have to drag our boat across a sandbar or up a bank to get into a remote backwater slough to locate shallow water. However, we learned that if we paid the physical price to catch big crappie, we’d catch the monsters that most crappie fishermen only dreamed of catching.
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