Bluegill and Crappie Lures?

I love hand tie jigs for crappie.

But I'm going to try some plastics this year for ease of swaps. And my kids burn through the dang jigs like they're free!

Atx, and slab city jigs are two of my favorites.

I don't know that I've ever fished for bream with anything besides crickets and worms.

Road runners and beetle spins are also great on crappie. I just prefer jigging them out of trees vs casting at them.

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Beetle spin or rooster tail are two of the best bream lures you can get.

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I've never used a beetle spin, but on moving water in creeks and rivers, I've caught a million on panther martin spinners, any color with bucktail. But not so much luck with bream on flat water -ponds and lakes- on any artificial.

For crappie, any jig style (curly tail, mini tube, maribou, etc) as long it is black and chartreuse.

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I am surrounded by several lakes that have fishing piers. Once it starts to warm up and the fish start to spawn I want to be ready.

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They won't necessarily be spawning around the fishing piers, if that's what you are limited to. You might want to not necessarily fish the spawn if they aren't spawning at the pier.

Crickets and minnows are all I use.

The Sacalait love the Little George

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This OP. Lures are great if you have a boat and want to cover ground, but if you are somewhat immobile it’s tough to beat live bait under a cork

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This is my wife's favorite method of fishing. We use to go fishing all the time with a boat about 40 years ago. Life then got in the way and I had to sell the boat and start working out of state. If we were to get back into fishing and enjoying it a small boat could be in our future.

I catch over 500 crappie a year in very large lakes. Here is what i’ve learned:

-2 lures that work best for me are Bobby Garland baby shad on a 1/16 or 1/32 oz jighead or Roadrunner. Bait type/profile does matter some, but not that much. Lure size matters- err on the side of having a smaller bait

-sometimes you have to fish painfully slow to get bit

-color doesn’t seem to matter all that much. Ive spent countless hours testing this by trolling color variations of the same baits and one color never gets hit more than the others

-Depth is key. If you can find what depth theyre at (this changes constantly) and keep your lure in that zone, you will probably catch them.

-sometimes they just don’t want to bite, not sure why. I always catch the most fishing right before a front moves in.

Keep in mind these are private lakes. I know nothing about public lakes and rivers. Hope it helps.

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RandRules

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I've caught more crappie on this than anything else:



I spend hundreds of dollars a year and a ton of hours using other stuff that never works for me.