Mitchell is a bank-fisherman to the extreme. He loves to pull his boat up on a point, get out and fish from the bank. He prefers to use a double jig rig to jigs tipped with minnows. From the bank, he casts out and works the rig back to the point with the bobber often set 2 to 3 feet above the jigs. Mitchell said with the double rig at least one fly is always off the bottom in shallow water.

He also likes a round float versus the more popular oval ones. When he jigs the float to put action in the flies, the round bottom has more resistance and pops up faster than the pear-shaped float. Mitchell said not to overlook stumps near the bank that create a current break with slack water that can hold a pile of crappie.

The Muddy Creek area has always been good to Mitchell, and it’s also where he cut his teeth crappie fishing, saying he grew up there. The waters of Indian Creek and up around Walters Bridge are also very good. The ramp at Walters Bridge will also put you in the heart of Douglas Lake’s springtime crappie fishing.

REELFOOT LAKE — THE BEST
White crappie are still the dominant papermouths at Reelfoot. Tim Broadbent, a TWRA fisheries biologist in Region I, said there are still some black crappie there, but white crappie are what anglers catch more often. He noted that while Reelfoot tends not to produce as many big crappie as Kentucky Lake, the Reelfoot fishery’s capacity to produce high numbers of fish makes it one of the best crappie lakes anywhere.

Broadbent said most of the crappie caught come from the lower end of the lake. He said back in the 1980s, crappie, on average, were weighing about 1/4 pound. Later in that decade, the lake saw a boom in the pin minnow population, and the crappie forage just plain multiplied and as the baitfish multiplied, the average size of the crappie that fed on them increased. The average crappie these days will weigh 1/2 pound. With increased size came increased pressure and the average catch did correspondingly drop, but it never really hurt the fishing itself. Even the commercial fishing that ended a few years back never really hurt the catch rate on this very productive lake.

From both an angler’s and a fisheries biologist’s points of view, Reelfoot is just a unique place in terms of the variety of enticing structure. Broadbent said there are so many different stumps and trees to choose from that Reelfoot is just a different kind of crappie lake.

And the best news is the lake is just as good as it’s ever been. Broadbent said to find a period when crappie fishing was any better at Reelfoot than it is now, you would have to go back prior to 1955 — before all the angling pressure and high-tech electronics.

Broadbent said Reelfoot is just a crappie factory — one that’s simply amazing. Broadbent doesn’t expect to see a change in the lake’s creel limit of 30 per angler nor the fact that there’s no size limit. He added that most of the crappie caught are in the 9- to 11-inch range.