One of the nice things about hunting ducks on Lake Okeechobee is that even when the shooting is poor, the crappie fishing is usually good.
Fortunately for me, I was on the Big O with Sam Heaton, one of the best all-around outdoorsmen I know and one of the country’s top crappie fishermen.
After a hapless morning of duck hunting, Sam saved the day by putting us on some slab-sided black crappies (pronounced CROP-ee), which are known locally as speckled perch or specks.
Our morning started at the Lake Harbor public waterfowl area southeast of Clewiston. The flooded rice fields managed by the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission had been filled with ducks, but the birds departed by the time the first phase of duck season opened Nov. 22.
On the day we slogged through the muck to our chosen shooting station, we never fired a shot. A couple of teal that we didn’t see until it was too late to shoot zipped past us, and we saw a handful of mottled ducks and teal fly over the opposite side of the field. We heard some sporadic shooting at the northwest corner of the area and watched some hunters shoot at ducks flying 100 yards high. By 7:30 a.m., we were on our way to Roland and Mary Ann Martin’s Marina in Clewiston for breakfast.
After we ate, Sam towed his johnboat, which contained our hunting gear, crappie poles and three dozen live minnows, to the public ramp in Moore Haven. A couple of hunters who had just returned to the ramp said the morning had been slow. Unfazed, Sam ran us out the Moore Haven canal, then we scouted several areas in the marsh that had been productive for ducks in past seasons. We saw a grand total of eight ringnecks.
“Let’s go fishing,” Sam said.
The field promotions manager for Minn Kota trolling motors, Sam, who lives in Stuart, gained acclaim as a crappie expert while guiding anglers on Weiss Lake in his native Alabama.
A skilled fisherman who catches everything from sailfish and snook to trout and tarpon, Sam used to guide bass anglers in northern Florida. When he started guiding out of Bay Springs Marina on Weiss Lake, he developed a knack, and a reputation, for catching large crappies, including a couple of 4-pounders. The world-record black crappie, which was caught in Virginia in 1981, weighed 41/2 pounds.
At Weiss and most other lakes, crappies relate to structure such as submerged trees. I remember a long-ago trip on the Black Warrior River in Alabama where we stopped at an empty boathouse — it was like a garage for a pontoon boat — and saw a bunch of crappies inside, most of which ended up in our livewell.
Okeechobee, like most natural Florida lakes, has very little of that type of structure.
“There are no boat docks or trees or stumps or bridge abutments for the crappie to get around in Lake Okeechobee,” Sam said. “What’s the only structure out here? Vegetation.”
Since Okeechobee has so much vegetation, it can be hard for the average angler to pinpoint the crappie. Many people fish what’s jokingly known as the bent-pole pattern: They go wherever they see a bunch of boats catching fish.
Not Sam. We went to Observation Shoal and headed into the thickest clumps of maidencane we could find. He fished a jig while I used a minnow. It didn’t take long for Sam to lift the first of several crappies into the boat. He also caught a nice-sized bluegill, and I caught a small largemouth bass.
The hardest part of the fishing was getting our baits in the water next to the maidencane without hooking or tangling our lines on the vegetation. Many times, Sam had to skillfully use his trolling motor to maneuver the boat close enough for us to undo the snags with our hands.
For now, when crappies are just beginning to get into their prespawn pattern, snags are a fact of life for those who want to come home with a fine fish dinner.
“I think the maidencane has more foliage than the bulrushes, and it offers protection from the sun and from predators,” Sam said. “And crappie like to eat little minnows and grass shrimp in the vegetation.
“I believe that as the water gets colder, the crappie will move to the bulrushes, because bulrushes stick up higher and absorb more heat from the sun and they transfer that heat to the water.”
As the water gets really cold, the fish suspend in deep water in places such as the rim canal and Harney Pond canal. So many boats fish for crappie at night with lanterns at Harney Pond that the canal looks like a small city.
When water temperatures are tolerable, crappies will spawn in Kissimmee grass. The bulk of the spawning activity is in the winter.
“That gets them concentrated,” Sam said. “The males have to be in with the females to fertilize their eggs. The females put the eggs on vegetation and the male has three hours to fertilize them before the eggs die. Then he’ll guard the eggs.”
Sam added that cold is a relative term when it comes to crappie and Lake Okeechobee.
“These fish are so susceptible to water temperature changes,” he said. “The water temperature can change four degrees and these fish act like it changed 20 degrees in other lakes. They’re just like us — when the sun’s not shining and it’s below 70 degrees, it’s a cold snap.”
Steve Waters can be reached at or at 954-356-4648.
SPECK SPECIFICS
There are two types of crappies, black crappie and white crappie. Florida has only black crappies, which are commonly known as speckled perch or specks because of the black markings on their body and fins.
The limit on crappie is 25 per angler per day. Anglers are allowed to keep 50 panfish, which include bluegills, shellcrackers, warmouths and spotted sunfish.
The two most productive baits for specks are small jigs and live minnows.
Crappie expert Sam Heaton of Stuart likes to fish as shallow as possible in clean water. “By fishing shallow, it’s easier to manipulate the bait, and you’re a lot less likely to get hung,” he said.
He puts a minnow on a small gold hook, hooking the bait through the eyes, and suspends it under an adjustable float. A split shot on the line between the float and the hook gets the bait down. “If the water’s 3 feet deep, I want my bait to be down 18 inches. I don’t want to see my bait,” he said.
When fishing in thick vegetation, Heaton moves the split shot close to the minnow to prevent the bait from swimming into the grass.
Heaton uses an elongated float rather than a round bobber because it’s easier to detect strikes with the float. “When the float is on its side, you’ve either caught a fish or you’re hung,” said Heaton, who sets the hook with a snap of his wrist.
— STEVE WATERS
