Stockton crappie gurus

[Dutch]

I am not a knowledgeable crappie guy.  I rarely fish for them.  I have been twice the last few days and 70+ crappie.  There have been some shorts but no tiny 6-8” like I have seen in the past.  
 

Is Stockton missing some age classes or are they hanging out around the brush?  What have you guys been seeing?

[MrGiggles]

We definitely have a missing year class. 2020 and 2021 have been pretty underwhelming as far as crappie goes, a lot of short fish. That is changing now, all of those short fish from last spring are surpassing the minimum. The next couple years are looking promising.

I think the pressure from peak Covid shutdowns in the 2020 spawn may have had something to do with it as well. Average size was really good up until then. We also may have had a killer spawn in 2019 from the floods. I'm no biologist so that is just conjecture though.

I have also noticed that the big ones and little ones don't seem to hang together all that much. In my experience it's usually one or other for the most part. Might be in the same house, but not in the same bedroom, the shorts may be suspended near the top of the pile, while the bigger fish may be deeper along the fringes or only on one side, as an example.

The short/keeper ratio on my last trip was probably close to 3:1, not many short fish on brush piles either. 

 

[straw hat]

I also think there is a couple missing year classes. I know that last year there was a poor spawn in general and a lot of eggs were reabsorbed.

[olfishead]

Looks to me like the 2020 Y.C. is pretty weak. Too soon to see the '21 Y.C. those are probably 2-4 inches and many are still scattered and pelagic.  We do have a good 2019 class to pick on though, blacks and whites.

[Dutch]

How long does it take a crappie to reach 10 inches?

[MoCarp]

In Stockton they reach 10” in the 3rd year on avg

[Dutch]

I figured it would take longer than that.

[MoCarp]

I’d like to see it changed 12” and 10 bag limit