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Got Crappie Fly Recipes?

4K views 13 replies 7 participants last post by  fishhead 
#1 ·
Just picked up some materials at the local fly shop for tying minnow patterns and they included soft grey hackles about 4-5 inches with marabou at the quill end, some enameled pearl eyes, crystal flash in peacock and will add buck tail and or fox tail to contrast the light gray hackle. I may tie in a herle on each side for a lateral line. Anybody specifically targeting Black Crappie? If so what flies work well. I'm still a beginning tier and caster and have only caught crappie on the fly once before with a friend last month on gummie flies that he had. They were real effective from my canoe by short casting them with floating line as the breeze pushed us across the pond with no stripping of line. Any ideas would be great. I may try to make some gummies too with a strip of minnow shaped pop-tart mylar embedded in silcone goop with a hook and eyes attached also embedded.....maybe.... depends on how messy it gets.
 
#2 · (Edited)
you sound right on track with your materials, especially minnow imitating shiny materials and materials with alot of movement.

There are few people who target crappie specifically enough to create unique patterns for them, but a standby for me is any sparkle wooly bugger in sizes 12- 8, its shiny enough to grab their attention and the flowing movement of the marabou entices the bite more readily. My recomondation is to be creative with your tying and find what works for crappie in your area.

heres my recipe for a fly thats been producing well for me in my neck of the woods.

hook- Daichi 1270 or similar bend long shanked hook in size 12
gold bead head
rubber legs
collar- black ostrich herl and a peacock herl wrapped at the same time
tail- black goose biots
the rest of the body is medium black wapsi wire and peacock krystal flash
the fly is similar to a rubber leg copper john but with more movement
 

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#3 ·
Crappie have relatively large mouths for their size, so I use hooks up to size 4 for them. Standard flies like clouser minnows, wooly buggers, and any minnow imitating pattern work well. Sometimes a buggy subsurface pattern such as a bully spider will also get them.

I have always, always done better with crappie when using bright attractor colors such as white, yellow, chartruese, and pink in my flies. These color schemes really seem to get their attention around here, but then again I don't fish in super clear water.

Have fun.
 
#4 ·
Lots of good advice above. Stick with bright colors and let the fly sit. Crappie like to hit a motionless target. A bright unweighted or lightly weighted woolly bugger that suspends in the water will pull them in all day.
 
#8 ·
fishhead,

When I lived in a area with a lot of black crappie in the stock ponds the ranchers built on their spreads, I found the most effective flies to be either a plain Black Woolley Bugger with a sparse amount of pearl Krystal Flash in the tail on a #8 or #10 4xl hook or a #8 Black Bunny Leech tied with a very short red marabou under tail, black rug yarn body, oval silver ribbing, black bunny strip tied at front of hook and held down with the silver tinsel matuka style, and a very webby black hen hackle collar.

Each of these was weighted with either lead wire under to front 1/3 of the body, a large brass bead tied behind the eye so the body went over it, or extra small led eyes tied after the hackle was wound. The weighting was to give the fly a jigging action as the fly was retrieved with strips and pauses on a floating line.
 
#9 ·
Tied some Clousers.....sort of....don't laugh...

you might choke or spray your monitor if you're drinking anything.

Here's a few pix of my first ever efforts at Clousers or minnow patterns for targeting Crappie, Bass or whatever. Some are from other recipes and some are just "thought up". After looking at some internet sites for patterns I find I have tied the Half and Half by Clouser and Kreh by accident without ever having seen it first. Just luck I guess. They are similar with common ingredients of peacock herle for a lateral line, peacock crystal flash and either bucktail and fox together or white marabou or light grey hackles and dumbell eyes with white thread. Some of the hooks were bent slightly at up to a 30 degree angle to assist in being more weedless. One was a hackle tail variety with a wound hackle for the body. I fished one yesterday for a few minutes and it appears to be toothpick thin in the water. Is it tied too sparsely? After looking at some recipes, I noticed that many say to tie sparingly, but some were a bit bushier. Just wondering if I need to double up on some materials or keep it "lite"? Please don't look too close at the thread windings, guys, a vise is on order. EGADS! you say? Yep.....I've been tying on my forceps the whole time and after a few hundred flies, I broke down and ordered one, and a bobbin, a bodkin, whip finisher, and hackle pliers. And I cobbled together a laptop box to catch the waste and have a clamping place for the vise. Can't hardly wait. I think the lack of the 3rd hand and the fact that hackles will unwind like a spinning propellor when you get near the hookeye and try to secure them...... and......let go too soon! AUUGGHHh! what a glutton for frustration I am! lol! OK, you can quit laughing now and clean your monitors from drink spray. Surely, I'm not the only guy to have ever hand tied a fly in this manner. Right? a WHOLE LOT of my early flies look like something a barnyard cat yakked up after eating a bird. But one really ugly fly is no more than small cube of white foam with long, knotted peacock herle legs tied helter skelter on it looking like a drowned Daddy-long-legs and it catches fish like nobodies' business...go figure.

 
#10 ·
Glad to hear you have "seen the light" and decided to get a good vise along with the bobbin and other tying tools. They will make a very big difference in both ease of tying and how well your flies and tied.

These Clousers of yours don't look too bad. They have good proportions, aren't too sparse or too bushy. The thread wraps, etc. will fix themselves in short order after you get the vise and other tying tools. You are tying some pretty decent flies despite having handicapped yourself pretty well with the hemostats for a vise and no bobbin.

Bob Clouser designed his Clouser minnow to be sparse, sparkly, with a prominent eye, and with a jigging motion to imitate a frightened or wounded minnow. Yours are very close to the sparseness of his. Remember, they were designed to give the illusion of life, not bulk, and Clousers are superb in producing the illusion of life.
 
#11 ·
Hey flytyer, a big THANKS!

That does give a guy a big boost of confidence. The one I fished yesterday for only about 10 casts (time ran out) is the number 3 in the top pic. Since the pond was glass calm I could see the fly when it ran about 2 feet under or shallower when it got closer to me. Hence the "toothpick" analogy. More like a winglless albino damselfly darting around underwater. I'm getting good info here and will see how my tying progresses after the vise and bobbin get in hand. My head shape and general threadwork are not the neatest and I look to improve with the right tools and a stationary fly instead of hand held forceps and not enough fingers to add and control the fly ingredients. Here's a little bugger fly-no name really and now re-thinking it there would be matching thread not the white that I used. Oh well, I'll learn someday.
 
#14 ·
Yea.....I love the GRAVY! My wife called up and said she and the kids were going to go out for a couple hours and I headed to the pond. I tried topwater for about 20 casts with no interest in several spots on the pond and changed over to the newly tied Clousers. About three casts into it I hooked up a junior Bass and it gave a good pull, wiggle, and a flip. Then the next catch was a twenty foot Pine tree top- my steeple casting needs work. That broke off my fly, tippet, and partial leader. Next up - a very nice Crappie from the dam side deeper water. The retrieve used with a foldover foam strike indicator to key on is a very, very slow retrieve with the tiniest up and down jugging of the rod tip. This made the indicator go forwards and back on the pond surface hopefully imparting life to the clouser below. Moving around the pond I got another Bass or two and switched to the above brown and white bugger and caught one Bluegill (mediumsized) and one small Bass.

Time was up and I went back around to first area where I had parked and my motto is "leave on a good fish" or at least try to when the time is short. So....I cast and caught another bluegill and tried one last time and got a definite STOP on the fly. The line tightened and started to tug and bend the rod. Hmmmm...something of size under there. In a few seconds I'm rewarded with a flash of silver green of a sideways much bigger fish. The lack of a strong run and the head jerking made me think of a large crappie, but no it turns out to be another Largemouth and this one's mouth measured right at 4 inches across when fully open. Not quite a lunker but decent from this little pond. My pix are still on the camera. All in all, I felt pretty confident about the clousers and my success rate though some look skinnier in the water than I thought would be effective. My vise and tools should be here this weekend and I'm ready to tie some smaller, scaled down, mini-Clousers to match the itty bitty minnows I see at the very edge of the pond that appear to be an inch or so long.
 
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