Crappie Fishing Techniques: Keep Those Crappie
You can stop losing crappie, when you overcome crappies falling off your hooks.
Paper-mouth crappies are known well for their papery-thin soft mouths. Setting your hook to hard merely tears the membrane away and releases your hook.
Illustrating by watching and doing is the best way to teach the technique of setting hooks on a crappie. The biggest tip is not to yank the line. You will be using a quick jerk of the wrist, keep practicing until you get it right. Keep in mind, the amount of pressure will vary according to the depths of the water. For instance, hooking a crappie in shallow waters, the pressure you apply transfers directly to the hook. Your force disperses before reaching the fish when you are fishing in deeper waters.
The type of pole you use is another factor to consider, you want a soft tip pole with a strong backbone. I prefer B’n'M Pro Staff Trolling Rods for slow trolling and B’n'M Buck’s Jig Poles for jigging. These types of poles seldom lose fish, since you can set the hook as hard as you like, while the soft tips keep from tearing hooks out of crappies mouth. All it takes is a quick upwards jerk of the wrist without raising your arm or elbow.
After setting the hook, remember to keep a slight bow in the rod with tension on the line. While you are moving it towards the boat, allowing the line some slack will give the crappie an opportunity to shake the jig loose from its mouth.
The B’n'M Pole allows you to pull in crappie easily with its strong backbone once you get the fish close enough to the shore or boat. Learn to use your fishing net efficiently for hauling in the big ones. To avoid loss near the waters surface make sure you have caught the crappie in your net, since odds are you may.