The top two areas on Kentucky Lake for springtime crappie anglers are the Blood River and Jonathan Creek embayments. Both have oodles of submerged habitat, which can be located with a depthfinder without too much trouble. Fish generally start out on the flats at 10 to 15 feet. Crappie then gradually move into the banks as the water comes up, gets warmer and allows them to swim in no more than 2-foot depths over shoreline cover.

"Anglers tell us the black crappie can be caught in really shallow water, and using various techniques such as drifting and slow-trolling jigs about 2 feet deep over flats adjacent to the creek channel works pretty well, for example," Rister said.

Before the fish get right up on the bank, white crappie will be found out in a little deeper water, around some type of cover, often along a dropoff where brushpiles have been placed. Spider-rigging or straight lining the deeper cover are two good methods to use in those situations.

Another tip for finding spring crappie on either lake is to look for any of more than 300 fish attractors that the KDFWR has placed in these reservoirs, anything from stakebeds to the newest thing going, an O-No Hang fish attractor. You may have seen them in stores or on television. Rister reports at least one electro-shocking trip, actually for largemouths last fall, rolled up about 30 crappie around one of these new, ball-shaped attractors. One-third of those fish were keeper size, he mentioned.

"We've got these new attractors, marked as experimental, tied on underneath about 60 buoys in the two lakes.

"There are four or five balls under each buoy that have sticks poking out in all directions around the ball; we're investigating how well these types of attractors are working for fishermen," he said.

"We've got wording on the attractor markers asking anglers to give us a call and let us know how they do around these things.

"There's just a tremendous amount of habitat out there for crappie, and anglers shouldn't have too much trouble finding it, and hopefully some good fish associated with it, too," the biologist said.

"I suspect this year should be pretty good on Kentucky and Barkley, if anglers are watching the weather, and be aware that the black crappie will be on the move sooner than what the white crappie have done in years past," he concluded.

NOLIN RIVER LAKE
If you have a little time free this spring, and aren't too far with our blessed gas prices to get to Nolin, biologist David Bell reports that crappie fishing looks pretty darn decent.

According to his latest check, he's seeing good numbers of 8- to 10-inch crappie in this 5,700-acre reservoir in northwestern Kentucky. Anglers should consider taking a look for themselves this spring.

Nolin is a fairly deep lake, which can get fair amount of fishing pressure because of its proximity to the Louisville metro area. It still seems to perform pretty well, though, for crappie in the spring.

One trick to success on Nolin is finding cover in the right depth range when the water temperature gets in the mid-50s. The major tributaries feeding the lake hold a good number of fish, and those creek channels with some underwater cover or irregular cuts will be where crappie hold in March. In April, fish will move up on woody structure along the banks, where a jig with a twistertail or minnow will provide solid hits.

Early on, fish 8 to 15 feet deep, and probe the dropoffs along channel contours. It won't take long to come across some debris on the edges, where fish will stack up over cover before rushing the bank to do what they do this time of year.