Well Eep, I can tell you that crappies in the far SW corner of Iowa go bonkers for them. A friend's father-in-law was up here in MN visiting and was having his 85th birthday. I had given my buddy a couple of these to try while he was in Iowa and they worked super well for he and his fil, so I invited them over so the old boy could see how they were made. I did up 20 of them. The old fella was impressed. He was even more impressed when I bagged them up and handed the bag to him and said Happy Birthday! For the rest of that summer I got notified when that old timer had been fishing with his "new" bait and caught the heck out of the crappies while his fishing buddy didn't do so well.
One thing I have found with this particular bait color and this bait is that crappies really like it when there is a temperature transition in the water, as in both spring and fall. Both of the baits shown here were fished the day after the last photo was taken on a water where the ice had come off the bay we were fishing three days prior and the water temp was right at 37 degrees. I floated my submersible thermometer out over the open water with it suspended under a large float at about 8 feet where the water was about 10 feet deep and 37 was the only temp we saw. We set our slip floats at 7 feet, rigged up our jigs with these baits and hammered big crappies. Guy on ice across the lake in another bay with similar characteristics were catching nothing using traditional ice tackle.
Since we were fishing from shore we put the crappies in a bucket. as has happened so many times on that lake, the bucket miraculously had a few small 1-1/4" sunfish in the water that the crappies had puked up, some still kicking around and offered further proof that these large crappies were indeed feeding on last year's baby sunfish. Sunfish are a very strong fish in that lake and we think that it makes a big difference in the growth rates of the crappies since winter sunfish fry make such easy targets. And why we did so well on the fish that morning. Now on to the fall fishing. Same lake but right after the fall turnover, deeper water... 18-20 feet. Typical late open water fishing, fishing vertical, no float, in areas where the ice first forms on the lake and where the first ice fishing is best and it was a repeat of the spring fishing for us using these baits on 1/16 heads with #4 hooks. Since this was written, back in 2022, this bait has been our go to during these transition periods and we continue to do well.
