Photo by Michael Skinner

Crappie season is upon us. In April when the water temperatures begin creeping toward 60 degrees — or as some people say, when the dogwood trees start blooming — crappies begin their mass migrations to the shallows to spawn.

This is the time of year when crappies are most vulnerable. Concentrated in large schools, in shallow water and in predictable locations, spawning crappies are easier to find than they will be at any other time. The best fishing of the year awaits.

Where can you go to find spawning crappies? You probably already know about the big rivers and impoundments in Illinois. Rend Lake is the best crappie lake in our state. Lake Shelbyville is good, too. Crab Orchard and Lake of Egypt are both excellent. Certain pools of the Mississippi River and Ohio River have overlooked crappie fishing. Fish any of these big waters this spring, if you have the chance.

But not everybody does have the chance. For one thing, you need a boat to access the big waters. Other people do not have the time to travel to distant crappies hotspots. For these folks, this spring’s crappie hunt will mean fishing whatever local waters are at hand, whenever they have the opportunity to slip away.

That’s okay. You do not need a boat or need to be on a big impoundment to catch crappies. But you do — at least most of the time — need to get off the bank and on the water. That is where canoes come in.

People were fishing, hunting and trapping from canoes for years before Europeans arrived in Illinois. There is still a place for float-fishing in the modern world, especially for anglers who do not own boats. And in some cases, canoes can provide access to remote waters that boaters can never reach.

Some canoes cost no more than a few hundred dollars. They require little in the way of maintenance, and there are no insurance bills to pay. Forget about the hassle and expense of hauling a rig — just strap the canoe on top of your vehicle and go.

Canoes are amazingly stable and seaworthy vessels. Whitewater canoeing is best left to the pros, but otherwise there are few places a floating angler cannot go.

WHERE TO FLOAT-FISH
Canoeing is usually associated with “taking a float trip” down a river. While canoes are indeed ideal for river travel, plenty of other bodies of water are also open to exploration by canoe. Strip pits, small lakes and obscure streams may not have boat ramps, but they are all possibilities for the enterprising canoeist.

Hitting The Pits
Strip pits, for one, are especially conducive to float-fishing. Old strip-mining sites are locations where coal was once excavated near the surface of the earth. Afterward, the empty pits are allowed to fill with water and then stocked with fish. Pits are famously fertile waters for growing big game fish, but they are also notoriously hard to access.

Most pits have high, steep banks — the legacy of the former mining operations when the miners dug straight down for the coal. Rarely can pits accommodate boats, unless a special effort has been made to level a bank and construct a ramp. But a lightweight canoe can be slithered down a steep bank and launched at any point, opening up water that may be untouched by other anglers.

Crappie fishing on a pit is a little different from fishing on a lake. Spawning crappies have a well-known affinity for standing timber and other wood structure, but pits seldom have a lot of wood structure. This is another legacy of the hollowing-out process of strip mining. What wood cover you do find is typically the occasional tree that has been gnawed by beavers and then toppled into the water.