“Behold my friends, the spring is come, the earth has gladly received the embrace of the sun, and we shall soon see the results of their love. “ - Sitting Bull
“Institutions have turned mysteries into dogmas. They’ve lost the lightness of touch to translate the timeless wisdom into relevant teaching.” - Casper her Kuile
There are a great many rites of spring. Baseball, ramps in the mountains, planting lettuce, and onions, watching a winter worn pasture grow green again, chasing after gobblers, ticks, chiggers, and allergies are only a few rites of spring that immediately come to mind.
Paper-mouths, specks, calico bass, bachelor perch and some difficult sounding Cajun pronunciation, that I can’t exactly spell, but it kinda sounds like, ‘sock-ay-lay’ are all common names given to both the white and the black crappie. The pursuit of both of these silver and black fish are most definitely a rite of spring.
It really doesn’t matter what time of spring you start trying to chase after these speckled fish. Some wait until the dogwoods bloom. Many start their pursuit of these tasty panfish when the willows leaf out pale green. Many have found success when the first yellow offerings of spring blooms and frosty weather is still hard among us. Then there are the hardcore crappie fishermen that don’t wait for spring at all. One of these hardcore types I have fished with starts crappie fishing the day after he’s filled his freezer with venison. His traditional opening day of crappie season is usually Thanksgiving weekend.
Most crappie collectors that kindly invite me to join them on their rite of spring crappie expeditions will wait ‘till spring warms a little before they attempt to fill their freezers with fresh fish.
What is it that makes a chasing after these fish in the spring so popular? Besides the taste of a big fried fillet, it might be bragging rites that motivate many of us.
McClane’s New Standard Fishing Encyclopedia and international Angling Guide tells us that a half pound female black crappie will produce 20,000 to 50,000 eggs that reach maturity in roughly two years. It takes them another two years to reach twelve inches in length.
A. J. goes on to explain that a white crappie female produces about 2,900-14,800 eggs. And, if they survive, they’ll grow 1-4 inches the first year, 2-9 inches their second year and a six year old fish may be 6-12 inches long.
With this kind of reproduction, you’d think crappie have to be just about everywhere you could conceivably drown a minnow, or fling a curly tail grub. If you’ve ever been successful in loading your stringer, or a boat’s live well with crappie, and I am sure many of you have been involved in one of those memorable expeditions, those days of glory on the water are the sort of things that make crappie fishing a rite of spring. For a good many, crappie fishing each spring is an old tried and true family tradition.
Terry, down in North Georgia, tells tales of cane poles, creek minnows and filling washtubs every spring. Howell Raines, in his “Fly Fishing Through the Mid-life Crisis" tells a wonderful story of his family spring pilgrimage to Guntersville Lake to fill their washtubs. Crappie simply do not necessarily present a high tech fishing problem, and easy success at catching more than you can easily handle is one of the many endearing charms of this particular spring ritual.
Given the fact that crappie is an incredible reproducing machine, and on a good spring day, you don’t need to spend enormous sums of disposable income to outfit yourself for such a pleasing expedition. Why is it that there are days when you can’t catch much more than a cold?
Some fish we used to keep were so thin that when you filleted them you could still read the newspaper that they were being filleted on. Some wizard fisheries’ biologist in Nashville finally decided that a 10 inch crappie was going to be some kind of answer to some kind of fishy problem and we suddenly had to quit reading the fish wrap through fillets from 9 inch fish.
That reminds me of the old trout fishing story about a guy who was fishing a stream where the size limit for keeping trout was 9 inches. When the game warden snuck up behind him and asked to see his license along with the fish in his creel, the poor guy produced one fish that was measured by the warden at one good inch short of the legal length. The game warden asked the unlucky guy to follow him up the trail to his truck so that he could collect his expensive citation for an illegal short rainbow trout. As they hiked up the trail, the fisherman began to lag behind the warden and ‘massage’ the short fish in his creel. By the time they got to the warden’s truck where the expensive citation was being written, the fisherman asked the overzealous warden if he minded measuring the fish one more time. The look on the Warden’s face, when the fish suddenly had grown and measured to 9.5 inches, was well worth the walk back to the truck, according to the story teller.
I’ve never tried ‘stretching’ a 9 inch crappie. I don’t think it’s an anatomically built fish for that sort of thing without the use of a 16 inch radial tire on a truck, or a sledge hammer. I’m not sure what the exact monetary set back is for short crappie infractions these days. But, I can tell you this, releasing a 9.5 inch crappie has made me weep a time or two. Releasing a potential crappie sandwich has on more than one occasion made me sad. A decent spring ritual that includes trout or crappie should never make anyone weep.
That brings us back to bragging rights. How is it, with so many crappies being born, and mama crappies being so highly reproductive, can we still manage to go crappie fishing and get skunked? How is it that so many of my buddies can publish “HERO PHOTOS” bragging on social media, showing off photographic evidence of stacks of slabs that are drooping off the cleaning table, while the rest of us are continually contemplating running from the law with a five gallon bucket full of minnows and 9 inch crappies?
I guess some guy’s got it and some don’t on some days. Not all rites of spring need to end with hero photos on social media. If you stick with it long enough and you drown enough small creek minnows, sooner or later, some of those 20,000-50,000 hatched eggs will swim by. It’s a rite of spring.
“I’ve gone fishing thousands of times in my life, and I’ve never once felt unlucky or poorly paid for those hours on the water.” - Willam Tapply
“You know when they have a fishing show on TV? They catch the fish and then let it go. They don’t want to eat the fish, they just want to make it late for something.” - Mitch Hedberg
“Most fishermen swiftly learn that it’s a pretty good rule never to show a favorite spot to any fisherman you wouldn’t trust with your wife.” - John Voelker
WOMR Note: Collecting things garnered comments; One reader stated he didn’t really understand why he did what he did when it came to collecting things. It didn’t seem to bother him much though. Nor should it. Here’s to garage sales and flea markets!
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