Ate Up by Crappie Fishing

Dwayne Walker watched his bright yellow bobber move slightly, then bounce back into position.

Not much of a hit. But it was enough to persuade Walker to set the hook. When he did, he immediately felt the heavy tug of a healthy Lake of the Ozarks crappie.

“You have to be quick,” Walker said with a laugh as he swung the 11-inch fish into the boat. “You can’t wait for them to pull that bobber under.

“When they’re not in a real aggressive mood, a lot of times they’ll just come up and touch it. You have to be ready.”

Walker is always ready.

He fishes for crappies on Lake of the Ozarks at least two times a week, year-round. Forget the bass, catfish, white bass, and walleyes that lure others.

“I’m just ate up by crappie fishing,” Walker said.

He has the electronics, the light-action rods and reels, and tackle trays full of plastic and hair jigs to prove it.

Some anglers opine that crappies are easy to catch. And sometimes, especially when the fish crowd into the shallows in spring to spawn, they are.

But on far more days, a cold front or unseen conditions will cause the popular panfish to seemingly vanish. Those are days Walker relishes.

“You have to fit the pieces of the puzzle together,” he said. “That’s what I like — the challenge.”

Walker met that challenge on a cool day last spring.

He followed a reliable pattern. He cruised down a row of docks in a cove on the Gravois arm of Lake of the Ozarks and used the side imaging on his electronics to search for schools of crappies.

When a clump of dots showed up on the screen, he knew he was in the right spot.

“I usually don’t even make a cast until I spot fish in my electronics,” he said.

He reached for a rod with a small hair jig tied to the light line and launched a long cast. “In this clear water, I usually try to stay back a ways from the fish,” he said. “When they’re up shallow, sometimes the boat will spook them if you get too close.”

That strategy worked on this day. As Walker fished several schools of crappies at different locations, he steadily plunked fish into his livewell until he had his limit of 15 fish.

Those fish would be put to good use.

“My family loves to eat crappies,” he said. “It’s our favorite fish to eat.”

A Diversified Approach

Walker has plenty of ways to put food on the table. Though he stops short of calling himself an expert, he is on a constant quest to find ways to catch his favorite fish.

He started the way many anglers do at Lake of the Ozarks. He caught a limit of crappies on an April day, fishing from shore with a minnow under a bobber.

“I loved it right away,” he said.

An all-state running back for the Mattoon (Ill.) High School football team as a youth, Walker, now 38, spent his childhood days involved in sports, which left little time for fishing. Now he is making up for lost time. When he isn’t running his commercial cleaning and floor care business in Columbia, he often is on Lake of the Ozarks pursuing his passion. 

Today, he employs many tactics to catch fish. Though his favorite method is casting small plastic lures to shoreline cover, he also catches crappies fishing vertically under the signal given off by his Livescope, which shows the real-time movement of fish. He’ll also “shoot” docks, an underhanded method designed to get jigs under the docks where crappies hide.

He will troll crankbaits, such as small Bandits, and he will long-line jigs far from the boat to appeal to roaming crappies. It’s a game, figuring out what the crappies want. And Walker is an eager participant.

“It can change day to day,” he said. “You can catch them in one place one day, then come back the next and they’re gone.

“Sometimes, you have to switch to a different color or go to a jig with a different profile. You have to look at what they’re eating at that time of the year.”

A Great Place to Fish

Walker laughs when he hears other anglers grumble about how Livescope is hurting the crappie population at Lake of the Ozarks.

The 54,000-acre reservoir in central Missouri has long been known for its abundant numbers of the popular panfish. And Walker has seen little to change his mind that Lake of the Ozarks has some of the best crappie fishing in the Midwest.

“It’s not a trophy lake,” he said. “But it has lots of 10- to 12-inch fish. And it’s consistent. Every year, we just see a lot of healthy crappies caught.”

MDC Fisheries Biologist Samantha Clary agrees.

“Crappie fisheries are frequently referred to as ‘boom or bust,’ meaning that there is either a large spawn or very little at all,” said Clary, who manages Lake of the Ozarks. “Things aren’t that drastic here at Lake of the Ozarks.

“Our ‘bust’ years typically still produce a decent number of crappies.”

Much of that can be tied to fairly consistent water levels during the spring when crappies spawn.

Lake of the Ozarks isn’t a federal flood-control reservoir; rather, it is owned by Ameren Missouri and is a popular tourist lake rimmed by homes and cottages.

Even in wet years, the big lake seldom reaches high levels because water is released as soon as it is safe for downstream entities.

“Research points to large variations in water level being correlated with large variations in recruitment (of newly produced fry) for a number of fish including crappie,” Clary said. “Since Lake of the Ozarks doesn’t have huge fluctuations in lake level, that may be one of the reasons we see more consistent recruitment.”

An abundant baitfish population, many spawning coves with gravel or rocky banks, and good habitat in the form of brush piles and the docks themselves also are keys. 

Something for Everyone

Lake of the Ozarks is known for its ability to satisfy crappie anglers of all skill levels.

Many dock owners are content to fish the same way they always have. They sink brush around their docks, then use minnows to catch the fish that the cover attracts.

Then there are anglers like Walker who use high-dollar electronics to locate the often-hiding fish.

He is surrounded by four screens when he eases into his bass boat for a day of fishing. One shows a map of what the lake looks like beneath the surface — everything from the channels to the drop-offs, to the brush piles that have been sunk. Another shows real-time movement of the fish. Then there is a unit that is dedicated to showing what lies off to either side of the boat. And still another provides the depth of the water and the fish using it.

Despite all that technology, though, there are no guarantees.

“There are times when Livescope shows that there are all kinds of crappies right under the boat, but they just won’t bite,” he said. “That’s frustrating, but that’s crappie fishing.” ▲

Brent Frazee is an award-winning writer and photographer who was the outdoors editor of The Kansas City Star for 36 years before retiring in 2016. He continues to freelance for magazines, newspapers, and websites. He lives in Parkville with his wife, Jana, and two yellow labs, Millie and Maggie.