The day had started out well enough. My frequent fishing partner, Sid Brown, and I were on Lake Arthur, targeting submerged cribs, mainly for crappies. Lake Arthur supports a solid crappie population, and late fall is a great time to catch them — especially the bigger ones.

By jigging ¼ ounce blade baits, we were catching crappies with regularity. Around late morning, the action slowed. We checked out a few other spots, then returned to our original area toward mid-afternoon.

As is often the case when two longtime fishing friends are together, there’s a lot of angling-related talk. It was during one of these exchanges, during which Sid hadn’t moved his lure for nearly 30 seconds, that a big crappie inhaled the metal bait.

Our typical cadence when working a blade bait — compact metal vibrating lures of the Silver Buddy vein — is to give it a short upward snap of six to 10 inches, lower it on a semi-slack line, let it hover a few seconds, then repeat. As we chatted, though, Sid was simply letting the bait hang motionless when the fish hit.

Fish often tell us a lot if we’re willing to listen. So, we intentionally began exaggerating the pause component of the jigging action from a few seconds to as many as 30 seconds. During the next hour we took another dozen crappies, several of them in the 13- to 15½-inch range, all of them on the long pause.

It’s not surprising that this subdued motion is what it took to catch fish. It’s common in ice fishing for the less active presentation — tip ups or slow jigging — to be productive. And there’s not much difference when fishing from a boat when the water temperature is in the high 30-degree range.

During the past month, I’ve targeted crappies on a variety of area lakes. The “hang time” issue hasn’t been specific to only blade baits. In some instances, the same has held true when fishing light jigs dressed with plastics. A 1/16-ounce jig hovered motionless, with an occasional lift/drop of a few inches, has been productive.

Speaking of lure choices, it’s been interesting to see fish response on different waters. During my last couple trips to Crooked Creek Lake, only blade baits have been productive. During those times, the lake environment had been quite unstable, rising and falling several feet in response to local rainfall. Prior to that, when the lake pool had been stable, jigs with plastic bodies (and tipped with Berkley Crappie Nibbles) had been hot.

During two trips to Yellow Creek Lake the fish would only take jigs; they had no interest in blade baits. Besides jig/plastic combos, we also had great action at times with a one-inch Berkley Gulp Alive minnow on a 1/16-ounce jighead.

On Keystone Lake, both blade baits and jigs have duped crappies. And on last week’s trip to Lake Arthur, they only responded to blade baits.

In general, nearly all the crappies taken from these four waters have been holding tight to submerged wood in the 20- to 30-foot range. Regardless of the bait/lure being used, crappie bites can be hard to detect, especially from deeper water. Since crappies tend to feed upward, they often strike the lure from below, in which case you’ll simply lose contact with the lure.

Jeff Knapp is an outdoors columnist for the Butler Eagle