Judging by the contents of our live well Tuesday, there aren’t any small crappie in DeGray Lake.
Three anglers boxed 30, all between 12-16 inches long. We missed that many more, but our efforts were enough to fill six big bags with fillets.
The group included Grant Westmoreland of Sheridan and Kevin Williams of Prescott. Westmoreland is an insurance agent and Williams is a contractor. They are childhood friends and lifelong hunting and fishing buddies.
Tammy Richardson, the first bass angler to win an ESPN Espy Award, was our guide. She was one of the most successful anglers on the defunct Bassmaster Women’s Tour. She still fishes local bass tournaments, but she spends most of her time nowadays as a crappie guide and running her houseboat rental business on DeGrayLake.
Tuesday dawned cool and clear when Westmoreland, Williams and I met Richardson at Iron Mountain Marina. Richardson warned us that she hadn’t fished in a while. That is standard patter for a fishing guide. They downsize the customer’s expectations, and the good ones then work like the devil to exceed them.
As soon as the sun came up, we began a day-long milk run of brush piles around the lake. Westmoreland, an accomplished crappie angler in his own right, knows DeGray well. Still, he fishes with Richardson often, and she sought his advice about which brush piles might be most productive on this opalescent morning.
Those who frequent Lake Ouachita are captivated by its beauty, purity and solitude. Their adoration is merited, but DeGray has all those qualities, too. It doesn’t have Ouachita’s tiara of mountains, but its garland of rolling, pine-headed hills suggests a vastness that belies its smaller size.
With the lake level low, Richardson deduced that crappie would gather around brush piles in depths of 25-30 feet. The tops of the brush came up to about 18-20 feet, though, which meant we were to fish live minnows under bobbers to depths of 15-18 feet.
Richardson learned her craft from Jerry Blake, owner of Action Fishing Trips at Lake Greeson. Keith Sutton, one of America’s most prolific crappie fishing writers, has said that Blake has taught him more about crappie fishing than anyone he knows.
He taught Richardson, too, and she uses his signature spider-rigging method to great effect. It consists of an array of color-coded rods with corresponding color-coded bobbers. One rod has blue electrical tape with a blue bobber. Another has red tape and a red bobber, and so on. The bobber on each rod is set to a slightly different depth. If one depth consistently gets more strikes, we adjust all the other rods to that depth. Richardson calls it an “Alabama rig on steroids.”
Depth wasn’t as much an issue Tuesday as timing. As soon as we dunked the minnows at the first brush pile, I caught a 15-inch black crappie. Williams caught another. We missed three more, and it was over almost as quickly as it began. It was the same at the next pile and the one after that.
We caught no more than five crappie per stop, and we missed as many as we caught. We missed so many because the fish bit lightly. Instead of gulping minnows the way they usually do, these crappie seemed to lip the minnows and swim away. When we pulled up the rods, we pulled the minnows out of their mouths.
Crappie also aren’t known as fighters, but these were pugnacious. Several fooled us into thinking they were bass, and one fought so hard we mistook it for a hybrid.
“There ain’t no small crappie in DeGray,” Richardson said.
We also caught a big bluegill that was a palm-and-ahalf, as well as a couple of Kentucky bass and some tiny largemouths.
We took a lunch break at noon. Richardson passed out Snickers bars while Westmoreland and Williams feasted on barbecue Vienna (pronounced VI-EEna) sausages. Williams cracked the seal on his Viennas and tore open a packet of plastic flatware.
“What are you doing with a plastic fork?” Westmoreland asked. “Man, you’ve done gone uptown !”
“They gave it to me when I bought these this morning,” Williams said defensively.
“I wouldn’t know what to do with that,” Westmoreland said, stabbing a Vienna with his pocketknife. “This is the only way I know how to eat these things.”
“I got mine right here,” Williams said, extracting a pocketknife from his jacket.
I asked if they’d ever opened an oil can with their knives.
“Oh, yeah,” Westmoreland said. “Scraped many a battery terminal with it, and then gone in the cabin and peeled potatoes with it. It ain’t no big deal. It all cooks off.”
“Grant’s always been one of these ‘more is better’ guys,” Williams said.
As he launched into a story from their youth, a bobber on one of Williams’ rods plunged. In the time it took him to put down his can of sausages and grab the rod, the crappie on the other end had tangled in the other lines and made a huge mess. It took about 15 minutes to untangle it all.
“See? That’s what you get for trying to tell lies on me,” Westmoreland said.
Westmoreland mentioned an incident with a paper shredder in his office. The machine was on its last legs, and it made a lot of noise. Westmoreland spritzed it with some silicone spray. The noise stopped, and the machine worked as it should.
“I thought, ‘Hey, gimme some more of that,’ ” Westmoreland said.
While the shredder was working, he gave it a long blast of spray.
“See what I mean?” Williams asked.
“It blew up,” Westmoreland continued. “I mean, literally blew up. It singed my eyebrows and all the hair on this side of my head.”
Williams shook his head.
“The man almost got hurt. In … the office,” Williams said with mock pity.
Our last stop produced the customary two crappie and three misses. We looked at the burgeoning live well and decided good was good enough.
It was even better that night on the table with fresh cut french fries. There were no small fillets.
You only get the big ones at DeGray.
Sports, Pages 27 on 10/27/2013