Arkansas Sportsman

Crappie fishing a trick at Grampus

Few things excite a fisherman more than photos of giant crappie.

Photos of big largemouth bass come close, but trophy largemouths are a lot like 140-class whitetails. They can be anywhere, but few anglers ever expect to encounter them, let alone catch them.

Not so with big crappie. If you are around crappie, rest assured that a good percentage of them are "slabs." If crappie are biting, there is as good a chance of catching big ones as not, and size is all that matters to a crappie fisherman.

Not surprisingly, the photo of the big crappie posing with Mark Hedrick of Little Rock in last Sunday's feature about crappie fishing at Lake Maumelle opened a spigot with crappie anglers around the state. That includes Willy Johnston, "The Barbecue Man" of Hamburg. He accused us of spoiling his weekend.

Johnston said he was riding high after a fantastic outing at Lake Grampus during which he and his companion caught 36 crappie.

Then he opened the paper and saw that photo.

He called to chew us out, and then we settled into a deep discussion about The New York Times Sunday crossword.

Lake Grampus is an interesting place that doesn't get a lot of publicity. Impounded from a tributary of Bayou Bartholomew in Ashley County near Montrose, it is similar to most lakes in southeast Arkansas with its signature hem of tupelo and cypress trees. It is also very clear, but it suffers from the same afflictions that beset other big backwaters such as Merrisach Lake near Dumas. It is covered with water hyacinth and other exotic invasive grasses that carpet the surface.

This isn't bad for fish. Quite the opposite, in fact. Dense vegetation gives fish refuge from the sun, and from predators. It's especially good nursery habitat for fry.

Dense vegetation is bad for fishing, though, because you can't easily get a boat through it.

"That stuff gets around your trolling motor, and every so often you have to lift it up and cut it off with a knife sometimes," Johnston said.

During the day you have to look for holes in the mats. If you can reach one, you can drop a minnow or a jig into a hole and catch plenty of fish.

The best fishing is in the evening, especially at the end of a gray day, like the one that treated Johnston to such great fishing last week.

"It was what we call a 'Grampus day' around here," Johnston said. "It was real cloudy, with a little wind. That's what we like because that's when we catch them."

The problem is that fish don't leave the cover when the sun is high, Johnston said. Unless you fish holes in the mats, you're wasting your time.

About an hour before dark, fish start prowling at the edge of the cover. If you catch them right, you can enjoy 60-90 minutes of frenetic crappie fishing.

That's exactly how it played out at Lake Grampus that day. It went from boring to bedlam in a heartbeat. They were all pretty good fish, Johnston said, but nothing like the monsters the Mark Hedrick, Matt Hedrick and I caught at Lake Maumelle.

A little disclosure is in order. Only half a dozen or so of the fish we caught at Maumelle were magnum slab like the one in the photo. Most were just ordinary, run of the mill slabs. We threw back some keepers that didn't rate with the others, and we threw back some little ones.

I had some extra fun when I called another friend that catches a lot of crappie at Lake Maumelle. He knows the lake well and has a few spots he likes, but of course he's always interested in knowing more.

"How do you find it coming out of the marina?" he asked.

"It's out there, not too far from the north shore," I replied.

"Do you go left or right when you leave the marina?"

"It's kind of hard to say because we fished so many places. We just kind of ended up there, and I didn't pay much attention to the marina."

"Can you find it again?"

"I might could if I had enough time. The dude that took me has it marked on his GPS, but I didn't think to mark it on mine."

I could hear the exasperation rising in my friend's voice as I continued stonewalling him.

It made me chuckle. He does the same thing to me all the time.

Sports on 11/12/2015

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