Billy and I put in at Parker’s Landing about 4:30 p.m. last Wednesday in his “new” 17.5-foot Sea Nymph and cruised for a distance, powered only by one 9.9 hp Johnson outboard, since we were choosing to fish in the “Under 10 Horsepower” section of Shenango Lake. The gray waters stretched out flat and calm as we traveled along, the sun was shining, and both the heavily-wooded shorelines looked fine and natural in their new-sprouting spring leaf growth. I sat back and enjoyed the ride.

We found some shoreline structure right away, anchored the boat, and tossed in our lines at 4:45. Seven minutes later I boated the first fish, a “keeper” white crappie 11 inches long, and that early success put smiles on our faces and confidence into our casts. Soon we landed a second fish, and then a third.

My brother and I are not crappie-fishing experts or innovators, but we do just fine using traditional methods honed over 40 years of fishing local lakes. We prefer ultra-light spinning rigs, first of all, for the extra fish-fighting action and the gentler setting of hooks in the delicate mouths of crappies.

We use long-shanked number six size crappie hooks and always place a couple of small split shot a foot above the baited hook to keep the minnows down in the feeding lanes. Lots of crappie fishermen have switched from live bait to jigs and lures, but to me you just can’t beat those two- or three-inch fathead minnows (never shiners or suckers) that wriggle lively on the line and horizontally when hooked under the dorsal fin. If the water is calm, your minnow action should cause ripples around your bobber. If not, it’s time to reel in and change baits.

Years ago we switched from round bobbers to the sleek and narrow “pencil” bobbers we now prefer. They create less resistance when the crappie is hitting and are less likely to discourage the fish from completing the bite.

One relatively new innovation we do use is Billy’s electronic Fishfinder, which helps us with water depth, structure, and locating fish, but we make most of our angling decisions based on visual clues. We cruise the shorelines searching for venues with structure: snags and stumps protruding from the surface and tree roots at the water’s edge, indicating where fallen trees lie on the lake bottom.

We like both anchoring in a prime spot and also drifting when conditions are right, and we did both last Wednesday evening. We casted in all directions and experimented with different bait depths at our first anchoring spot and found that five feet under the bobber in 10 feet of water worked best and that the fish were scattered and not concentrated in a single hotspot. If you’re catching fish in a particular location, you stay a while, of course. Remember the old fisherman’s adage, “Don’t leave fish to find fish.”

But after boating 10 fish in 90 minutes at our first location and releasing nine of them because they were too small, we decided to move. We drifted the shoreline west to east in the evening breeze. A quarter mile down we found another good spot, where a tiny island and a small peninsula were surrounded by snag and stump cover, so we anchored again.

I picked up another 11-incher right away, and then Billy caught the best fish of the day, a hefty, 13-inch-long “slab” crappie that he measured and held up proudly and then accidentally dropped over the side. We laughed and agreed we’d have to come back here another day and catch that fish again.

We caught a couple of dozen fish for the evening, crappies mostly, but also a few perch and two bullhead catfish, which you’re supposed to catch by fishing stinkbait on the bottom but which we always seem to run into with minnows under bobbers. Their heavyweight bending of the rod fools you into thinking you’ve just nailed the biggest crappie of the year, until you bring the whiskered, brown-sided beast to the surface and sigh in disappointment at the “trash” instead of “trophy” fish.

We kept a neat batch of six crappies 10 to 12 inches long that Billy took home to his wife Sandy. She’ll fillet them and bake the tasty white meat for dinner some night soon. Hey, maybe they’ll invite me over.

Good luck out there. And have a great week outdoors.

Don Feigert is the outdoors writer for THE HERALD and the ALLIED NEWS. He can be contacted at 317-985-2870 or dfeigert@verizon.net. Visit his Website at www.donfeigert.com.