Crappie Disappear

[LOZ5MMBILL]

This could get long. I would like to give an overview of an Iowa farm pond we fish and get some thoughts. For me it is very confusing water. It is about a 1/3 of a mile long, 50 to 75 yards wide with two arms coming off the a round "main pond". The arms are at 90 degrees of each other so one goes North and the other goes Ease. The North arm has a small arm maybe 100 yds long heading Northeast. The main pond is about 5 acres and the entire pond and arms are deep, 15 to 45 feet in the arms and up to 60+ feet in the middle of the main pond. First, we have never caught anything in the main pond. We always go to the arms but the entire pond has a lot of dead trees in it, some standing and some floating on top of the water. I have never seen another pond with even half the trees in it this one has. You can't run your trolling water without hitting trees or branches of the trees in the water submerged. A lot of trees and bushes grow right at the water level and hang over the water but don't hang in the water. In the early spring up to June we can catch crappie like crazy and some nice ones. This pond has the white crappie which I know can be a lighter version of a black crappie and it has black crappie and I mean BLACK crappie. Neat fish. In the spring we catch them in 5 to 15 feet of water usually fishing about 18" deep with minnows. If we go deeper a lot fewer fish and smaller fish. Spring, I think we have it figured out because we can catch 50 to 100 crappie a day and throw 99% back. Starting in June we can't find them anywhere. We think warmer weather, deeper fish. You can catch a few with a grub and jig but only a few. We have tried different baits, including live bait straight down and on slip bobbers changing depth every 15 to 20 minutes and then moving every 20 to 30 minutes. I have a depth finder (can't find fish with it so it isn't a fish finder) but we rarely see fish on it but with all the wood that would be hard in reality. Any thoughts? Sometimes you can't see the forest for the trees but another person can see clearly through the trees that I can't see through. I could write pages of what we have done trying to catch them, we aren't lazy or without imaginations but I'm telling you these fish migrate to the farm fields because we can't find them in the water. Any thoughts?

[fishgypsy]

Not sure why you're not catching them, but crappie tend to prefer cooler water than many other species, water in the upper 60's to low 70's. In summer they tend to migrate farther down the water column, often just above the thermocline, where water is cooler. The amount of available habitat in the pond- all those standing and downed trees, means they may spread out quite a bit after spawning, too. Good luck!

[jdmidwest]

They will be following the baitfish or lurking down deep. Is there any treetops or structure sunk in the lake? Look around that.

We have crappie in several ponds, in the summer they will be in the center in the deeper water. They take plastic grubs and mister twisters well. It helps if you can find some structure, they will lurk around it.