Dave Csanda recommends checking out bays and connected lakes for winter crappies on ice.

Here’s a principle you can use to locate crappies from late fall, throughout winter and often up until ice-out. I like to call it “connected waters” or “the crappie connection.”

In essence, it involves crappies moving from one section of a lake or river to another where they can safely spend the winter under the ice, with plenty of forage and oxygen to keep them happy and healthy until spring.

River crappies

First, let’s look at rivers. Crappies never really fight strong current in rivers during summer and fall, although they may move out of bays and backwaters to set up in flooded standing timber at river bends if the current is modest there. If it’s strong, they simply don’t; their flat, wide bodies just don’t do well fighting current.

As the water grows colder in fall, crappies hightail away from current in favor of slack or semi-slack water. In large rivers with backwaters, they shift toward the back ends with sufficient depth to spend the winter months. Four to 6 feet of depth might be sufficient. Fish can be right out in the basin, or in flooded trees along the shoreline.

If crappies move through a channel into a connected natural lake, chances are they’ll dump down into the basin of the lake, taking up residence in perhaps 18 to 30 feet of water. Here, you can vertically jig for them in fall, and fish through the ice in winter. They’ll likely wander around the basin, following minnows, feeding on emerging insect larvae or rooting larvae out of the soft bottom. Electronics allow you to zero in on their location and depth.

Lake crappies

In a shallow natural lake with a bowl-like basin, crappies may spend much of the winter simply patrolling around the basin, looking for food, in modest depths of 20 to 30 feet deep. However, if the lake is considerably deeper, crappies will avoid extreme, 50-foot depths, if possible. If no shallower basin areas are available, they may hug any shallower flats available next to weed lines or humps.

If a channel or creek connects a smaller natural lake to the bigger, deeper one, at least some of the crappies may pass through the skinny water and set up residence in the connected lake. If there’s 20 to 40 feet of water in the shallow basin, crappies will spend the winter there. Rather than having to try to hunt them down around the perimeter of the adjacent large lake, it becomes like shooting fish in a barrel in the smaller, connected one. Dense fall and winter crappie congregations are common.

The principle of seasonal migrations through and into smaller hotspots applies for many species throughout the seasons. Be aware of it and use it to your advantage.

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