A high school teacher and some of his students have contributed to the good crappie fishing at DeGray Lake by building and placing artificial habitat.
Jerry Fendley teaches agriculture at Centerpoint High School near Glenwood, and he is a Future Farmers of America adviser. Johnny Cantrell is a wildlife biologist for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and is based at the Corps office at DeGray Lake. In 2009, Cantrell approached Fendley for help with a separate project. They started talking fishing, and that conversation spawned an idea for improving crappie habitat in the lake.
“We had some good manpower with my students, sowe started a partnership with the Corps of Engineers building condos.”
Fendley said they built 200 structures in 2009. They put 100 structures in DeGray Lake and 100 in Lake Greeson. They have built and placed 60-80 per year since then.
“Two hundred almost killed us,” Fendley said. “The Corps provides all of the concrete. I have an acre-and-ahalf patch of bamboo on my property. My students and I cut it and bring it to the shop. We have a concrete mixer, so we mix it up and we get plastic buckets donated to us from various places.”
Each year Fendley, the students and Cantrell spend a day sinking crappie condos from the Corps’ barge. They mark the locations on GPS units and add them to a database.
“They’ve got a file that’s available at the Corps of Engineers’s office,” Fendley said. “They say they’ve given out several hundred maps.”
Fendley also has a thread on crappie.com that he said has been viewed 43,000 times.
“I’ve given an electronic file of GPS coordinates to over 500 fishermen myself,” Fendley said.
The lifespan of a crappie condo varies. If it stays underwater and is not exposed to air, Fendley said they can last eight to 10 years. Those that are exposed to air last only about three years, he added.
The students get extra benefits from the project. Fendley said spending time with Corps staff is sort of like job shadowing. Talking with professional biologists teaches them the importance of building or enhancing fish habitat in aging reservoirs.
“It’s community service for the students, so when they apply for scholarships they’ve got several hours of community service they can list,” Fendley said. “If they do it for one year, they’ve probably got in 30 hours of community service. If they ever try to get a summer job with the Corps, it kind of gives them a leg up because they’ve put in all those volunteer hours.”
Since 2009, Fendley said, about 60 students have contributed more than 2,000 man hours to the project.
There is a good chance that some of their condos produced some of the big crappie that Grant Westmoreland, Kevin Williams and I caught Tuesday.
Sports, Pages 27 on 10/27/2013