“Should I stay, or should I go?”

The chorus from The Clash’s early 1980s rock song often sticks in my head during fishing trips, an earworm likely generated by a nagging question as to whether to stay on a particular spot or move on.

This can be a particularly taxing question this time of year, when cold water temperatures drive down the activity level of fish. They still eat, but don’t expect them to aggressively pursue lures or baits. Typically it takes a painstakingly slow presentation to get them to bite.

The conditions faced also come into play, which can help determine if it’s wise to continue to fish a certain area or make a move.

Take, for instance, a trip I made several days ago to Lake Arthur for crappies. The forecast for the day showed a high in the mid-40s with a 10- to 15-mph southwest wind.

Over the years, I’ve located many offshore brushpiles on Arthur, cover that has the potential to attract crappies during late fall and into winter. The most productive ones are located in two general areas, in the long reach between the Route 528 bridge and Neely’s Point, and also in the deeper basin near the dam.

The drive west on Route 422 allowed time to come up with a basic strategy. In my mind I replayed some great post-Thanksgiving outings in recent years out of the 528 area and visualized a replay.

First decision made.

After dropping the boat in and idling under the Route 528 bridge, I faced a steady wind blowing down the chute from the main lake. Not a howling wind but a consistent one, enough to churn up whitecap-tipped waves. Stops at three separate spots only produced one yellow perch, a fish that hit a small blade bait as the bow of the boat bounced in the wind, one that was showing no sign of laying down.

My thoughts drifted to the area by the dam, which given the wind direction and its semi-protected nature, seemed a better choice. Should I stay, or should I go?

A half hour later I had the boat back on the trailer and was heading for the McDanels access.

Second decision made.

Relatively calm waters greeted me, along with a surprisingly empty parking lot. With a couple hours of daylight remaining, I slowly cruised over numerous brushpiles, cribs and creek-channel stumps.

A few fish showed up at various spots, enough to warrant attention. The crappies didn’t jump in the boat, but in a fish-here, fish-there manner I caught a few, mostly on a 1-inch Gulp Alive minnow. For the most part they were small- to medium-sized fish.

Not finding any great concentrations of crappies, the hunt continued. I scanned a couple brushpiles that always looked good but had never produced. Maybe today was the day. One of them — an impressively sized tree limb that rose several feet off the bottom — seemed to have crappies holding tight to it, but several casts produced nothing.

Perhaps as the twilight set in these fish would fire up and start biting.

I idled over a nearby spot, where a submerged tree branch lay along the edge of a large point. The shallow end was in 16 feet of water while the other extended out to the 30-foot range near the creek channel. In the past I had taken crappies there, but it had never been “the spot.” The sonar display, however, returned several targets that looked to be crappies.

A few casts confirmed this suspicion as a medium white crappie was boated. A few minutes later, another. The sun was about to drop below the horizon, and the action was picking up. The thought of returning to the nearby tree, to see what it might produce during the witching hour, was tempting. The earworm returned.

I thought of Al Schmidt, one of my longtime guide clients, who when asked what we should do in similar situations would reply, “Jeff, we shouldn’t leave fish to find fish.”

I stayed.

More fish started showing up on the sonar screen, mixed in with large schools of gizzard shad that concentrate in those deeper lake basins come fall. The bite switched to a small, gold-colored blade bait, and the fish got bigger. I caught and released several between 13 and 16 inches before darkness set in, sending me back to the ramp.

Thanks, Al.

Jeff Knapp is an outdoors columnist for the Butler Eagle