Brush Up on Fall Crappie

 

Slabs in the brush? Here’s how the experts find them and get them out.

A good brushpile is like friend you can count on day after day. Crappie can be caught from many different kinds of cover at various times, using a host of techniques. For sheer dependability and simplicity of approach, though, it’s tough to beat finding sunken brushpiles and working jigs around them.

We spoke with two of the nation’s top crappie guides, Todd Huckabee and Barry Morrow, about their approaches to fishing brushpiles during the fall. Huckabee and Morrow both guide full time, primarily on Oklahoma’s Lake Eufaula, with Morrow also doing some guiding on Missouri’s Truman Lake, and both are masters with a single rod in hand and a jig tied to the end of the line.

Pitching & Swinging

If Huckabee is fishing brush during the fall, he’ll normally approach it with a pitch-swing presentation, pitching a jig on a short line just past the brush and letting it swing back, pendulum-style, over the top of the brush and back to him. He uses the rod and a tight line to control the swing, keeping the jig barely above the top branches of a brushpile.

"The crappie tend to be on top of the brush, not deep down in it, this time of year," Huckabee pointed out. "The sun is at a lower angle, so they don’t need the extra shade found deeper down in brushpiles."

Most fish hit the jig at the end of the initial swing, just as it gets straight below the rod tip, so Huckabee won’t spend much time jigging the lure or just hanging it on a tight-line when he’s working brush during the fall. He might give the fish an extra moment or two, especially if he has gotten other hits that way on that particular day. Usually, though, he’ll just pull it up and make another pitch.

Huckabee likes Lindy X-Change Jigs for his pitching and swinging strategy because he can easily alter the rate of the fall and therefore the aggressiveness of the presentation by changing the size of the head. He’ll keep three or four heads in his pocket and might change a couple of times while fishing any given brushpile.

"A lot of people believe that the lightest jighead you can get away with is always the best, but that’s not the case," Huckabee said. "A lot of times the faster swing of the heavier jighead will prompt aggressive strikes from the bigger fish."

Huckabee - "If crappie this small will hit a jig this big, then why use a smaller jig?"

Huckabee likes to match an X-Change Jig with a Dancin’ Crappie Tube. During the fall, when the lake has recently turned over and tends to be stained but not muddy, he really likes Aurora Black, which features a black body and mix of pink and yellow tail strands.

Huckabee considers the presence of shad a huge plus during the fall, and he will look for brush and shad together in an area. "If the crappie have been feeding on shad, they will hit baits much more aggressively," Huckabee said. "And it doesn’t matter how stuffed they might be; they’ll still attack a bait when they’ve been in actively feeding."

Huckabee recommended looking in the backs of pockets for schools of shad and then looking for brushpiles in the area of the shad. On Lake Eufuala, Huckabee typically is looking for shad and brush in 10 feet of water or less this time of year.

Depth Control

Morrow also likes to fish Dancin’ Crappie Tubes over and around shallow brush, especially during the first part of fall, and he’ll commonly use the same pitching and swinging approach that Huckabee described. For the shallowest brush, though, he’ll often add a Thill Crappie Cork to the equation so that he will have precise depth control.

If the water is, say, 6 feet deep and the brush comes up to 3 feet, he’ll set the float 3 feet above the jig and will have clients pitch their rigs so each jig lands just past the brush and then swings down directly above it. If the fish don’t hit the bait on the initial drop, he’ll have them slowly reel a few turns of the handle to keep the bait at the right depth but still over the brush before bringing it back to make another pitch.

Morrow uses a Lindy Marker Buoy to stay on target with presentations, but he’ll typically drop the marker about a boat’s length away from the brush itself to keep from disturbing the fish or from disturbing the brush when he pulls the buoy back up. He always makes it clear to his clients where the brush is, relative to the buoy, so they can make accurate pitches.

Deeper Brush

Although Morrow will usually look shallow first during the fall (and he’ll stay shallow if he finds shad and cooperative crappie) he also catches a lot of fish around deeper brush, often near channel edges. Fishermen often sink brush near channel drops, so by simply searching those areas with sonar you can usually find plenty of places to fish, Morrow pointed out.

He has learned, however, that some of the most productive – and most overlooked – brush for fall fishing is often found around the bases of "pole timber." A lot of fishermen will fish the trees themselves and will catch crappie by doing so, but they will overlook the highly productive treetops and broken off branches, which are normally on the bottom all around the tree trunks.

Morrow typically fishes the outer edges of the brush first, and then he’ll work directly over the brush before he tries dropping jigs farther down among the branches. Either way, he mostly sticks with vertical presentations for deeper brush because going straight up and down allows for more accurate deliveries and results in less snagged jigs.

Morrow matches Dancin’ Crappie Tubes with the new Lindy Jigs, fishing mostly with the 3/16- and ¼-ounce sizes. He always wants enough weight to keep his line tight and maintain good control of the jig. For vertical presentations around the edges of the brush or over it, he might instead use two 1/8-ounce jigs. He fishes jigs on 8- or 10-pound-test Silver Thread AN40.

Color-wise, Morrow likes Pink/Chartreuse Yellow, Orange/Chartreuse Yellow and Gold heads. Body color depends on the color of the water. For stained water, he likes Aurora Black or Aurora Blue. For clearer water he favors lighter colors, such as The Secret, which is a pearl body and has pink and black strands in the tail. At times, Morrow will switch from a tube to a Fuzz-E-Grub, having found that the crappie sometimes prefer the added action of the marabou tail.

An Added Note:

An important thing to realize, according to Huckabee, is that during the fall the crappie feed in short, unpredictable flurries, and that the best action might be at 10:00 a.m., noon or 2:00. "Just because you don’t catch fish from a brushpile, doesn’t mean they aren’t there. You might have to try that one several times before until you find them feeding," he said.

Huckabee pointed out how white bass and other surface-schooling game fish will suddenly erupt, seemingly out of nowhere, and feed voraciously. Then they go down, and they won’t hit anything. Crappie are the same way, he said. They just have their feeding flurries beneath the surface so it is less visual.

Contact Information:

Todd Huckabee: Website - www.toddhuckabee.com
Email - huckabeetodd@yahoo.com,
Phone - (405) 520-8980

Barry Morrow: Website - www.barrymro.com, (660) 723-2667