Try Slow Trolling Off The Bow Of The Boat When Crappie Hold On Scattered Structure

We’d heard that crappie were hitting on New York’s Lake Champlain, and one of Tom Steven’s friends had even sent a cell phone photo of a heavy stringer just taken from the lake.

- Vic Attardo

But when we arrived, everyone at the launch said the crappie fishing was poor. They weren’t trying to hide outstanding catches; they were returning to the dock genuinely glum.

Stevens called the angler who had sent the photo, and following five minutes of conversation, he turned to me and said, “No problem. We’re gonna kill ’em.”

Clearly he had a plan, and while it was not the approach I might have taken, it probably turned out much better.

He motored us into a backwater bay off the choppy main lake. The bottom registered 12 feet deep on the sonar, and it appeared as if every piece of drifting wood had been swept into the little bay.

In addition to the sunken wood on the bottom, a number of large trunks with bare limbs stretched out from the shoreline toward the bay’s center.

A couple of these trees had sizable portions above the waterline, and Stevens steered for one of them.

“Okay,” he said as he set long crappie poles out over the bow of the slow-going boat, “we’re going to troll right through this stuff.”

I equate trolling with pulling long lines from the back of a boat. But Stevens, same as many other astute crappie anglers, thinks of trolling as something best done with more precision from the front of the boat with very short lines.

As we got closer to the tree, we took seats on the boat’s foredeck. Stevens had rigged both 11-foot rods with a pair of slim nosed jigs about 2 feet apart and sticking out on short dropper lines. On the main line about 10 inches above the top jig he placed a 1/4-ounce egg sinker. But instead of pegging the sinker in place, he had run the line through the sinker’s narrow hole and then back through again, tightening the line on the second pass. This double loop locked the sinker in place.