Crappie being released back to the lake by a fisherman

Dcwcreations

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.

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