The site looks promising. It is 2 to 5 feet deep, the stream runs in, a small field of stumps littering the edges of a depression. Cut holes through the ice in a grid across the basin, then circle back with a flasher and wand. The first hole reveals a movement of movement among the mud in the hole; a few small, gray-bodied shrimp squirm among chunks of ice in the water. Drop your live imaging sonar transducer into the hole and the screen shows a cloud of fish a few feet away. Is perfect.
Drop a heavy tungsten jig and bounce it constantly up and down. A few minutes pass, but nothing appears. Just as you lift to get out of the hole and move on, you feel it: the dead weight on the line and the drop of the spring. You stand up excitedly and the battle begins. The fish makes a few runs before getting its giant head and snout through the hole. It’s the biggest cake pop you’ve ever iced. After dragging the gear a mile down a deer trail to a marsh, your hard work has been rewarded.
The above scenario may be common to many Mississippi River backwaters. These main stream tributaries and marshes often hold giant fish now, and savvy ice anglers move in for some of the best pinfish action of the year.
FIND THE PLACE
Adam Griffith is a Minnesota fishing guide and crew member of “The Crappie Chronicles,” a YouTube series that highlights his team’s efforts to find giant crappie each ice season in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region. He has come to love the backwaters of the Mississippi River and has become something of a fish master, known especially for catching big fish. Each season, he ices a few slabs that other anglers only dream of catching once in a lifetime.
In the winter, Griffith says, crappits no longer want to be in the mainstream. The bigger fish follow the baitfish into the backwaters as they make their migration in late fall. Crappies hang out here in the winter because they don’t have to work too hard. They have everything they need in one place. Food is the big reason crappins move here, and the water is often a bit warmer in the water cuts as well.
For Griffith and his clients, finding large boulders in backwaters starts with maps. Use Google Earth and aerial photos to identify attractive areas. Go through very shallow spots, those that appear to be two feet deep or less, to focus on those that are a little deeper.
“Fish aren’t always in the deepest places, but they want deep water nearby,” Griffith says. “‘Deep’ in a backwater means, like, six feet. Often times, we’re catching them in two feet of water. If there are stumps in the water, crappins will use them as current breaks, or sit behind them. or around them.”
Griffith’s scouting process involves not only looking at maps and aerial photos, but also finding public access or easements. While there is plenty of public land along the Mississippi River, private lots require permission from landowners to access for fishing. A fan boat may be required to reach parts of the Mississippi River along the southern edge of the ice belt. This is both for going down the main river bed and for motoring up backwaters and cuts and running gears on thin ice. Griffith and company fish backwaters between Hastings and Red Wing, Minnesota. However, La Crosse and Prairie du Chien, Wis., offer great remnant fishing, as do Lansing and Guttenberg, Iowa.
Equipped with a spring bobber, a noodle rod with a big bend is ideal for fishing small tungsten machines and plastics in the backwaters. (Photo courtesy of Clam Outdoors)
When Griffith approaches a rebound, he also takes note of a few variables. No two river systems are the same, nor are the backwaters the same from year to year. Griffith looks at how the current flows at the mouth of a backwater and determines both where it is strongest and where it settles. He says knowing exactly how bottom water is distributed, where the current enters, where it reaches the coast and where it leaves again, is crucial.
Even though the fish don’t want to be in the strong current of the main channel, it suggests that the current still has a lot to do with where you find fish in the backwaters. “We go in and check the seams and the swirls and start drilling it until we find the spot,” Griffith says. “We’re going to see where the fish are, and eventually we’ll find them in a juicy spot, often not much bigger than 30 feet wide.”
TACTICS
The giant fish that Griffith is looking for, black, white and hybrid alike, are found on specific foods, especially insects and smaller minnows. The size of the shad is often paramount, and crappies prefer those two to three inches long. Anything bigger is usually too big for them. Like crappies, walleye are flushed into backwaters. However, crappies don’t settle in the middle of a large school of walleye. Instead, they’ll be off to the side, hanging around the edge of the school of baitfish.
Griffith says anglers need to be able to tell the difference between rockfish and shad. If you see big marks swimming up to your bait but not biting, chances are they are shad. Backwater crappits generally chase insects and smaller gamefish. Insect hatches that do not occur in the fast water of the Mississippi River channel occur in the off-channel habitat. Griffith says he often sees various insects and invertebrates swimming through his ice holes.
Electronics help confirm that crappies are present, but are limited in shallow water. Griffith uses LiveScope to laterally scan the backwaters for hail balls and structural elements and to detect large crappits. In such shallow water, the sonar cone angles are so small that marking fish is limited to downward scanning. Typically, you’re marking the fish as it’s taking your bait, which doesn’t provide much preparation or interaction time.
The closed quarters of the Mississippi River’s shallow backwaters require specific ice tactics and equipment. For Griffith, rod choice is pretty important. He doesn’t like to use a rod with too stiff an action, unless he’s fishing a Clam Pinhead Jigging Mino and can use it to impart the proper jigging action. Otherwise, he’ll use a noodle rod, like the Thorne Brothers Custom Crappie Chronicles “Bart” rod, which has a spring bobber for bite detection. “A lot of times, you don’t even know the fish has your bait,” Griffith says. “These fish just come in and eat.”
A noisy spoon that rattles or vibrates, such as a Jointed Pinhead Pro, attracts fish in the shallow, murky backwaters of the Mississippi River. (Photo courtesy of Clam Outdoors)
To counter those quick bites that come out of nowhere, a spring bobber, like the one found on the Bart rod, is key to spotting bites. Griffith says the spring bobber will bend, but the fish won’t feel you move the rod. You can then fish aggressively, see the bite and not miss fish that would otherwise sense something wrong and drop the bait.
Because it’s such close-quarters fishing, if you hook a fish in three feet of water with a too-stiff rod, you run the risk of hitting it against the ice and pulling it out of the water. ham Griffith says Bart’s rod has a nice parabolic curve and also makes the drag drag back a bit so it slides when setting the hook. He adds that the additional rod donation is almost like a second drag.
Griffith developed his preference for using noodle tip rods in backwaters after some repeated failures on the ice.
“We were missing too many fish,” he says. “We’d hook them up and they’d lift up, or we’d hook them up and put two or three cranks in, and they’d be right under the ice and they’d be tapped. We started using that. [noodle] rod and our catch rate went up a lot. We just noticed that the cane with a lot less backbone, with a good bend, worked a lot better than the others.”
Because of the slack water and poor visibility, anglers will want to use aggressive jigging strikes and lures that draw attention. Griffith often has a rod rigged with a spoon, such as a Pinhead Mino or Leech Flutter Spoon. He also likes to have two bug imitations, one dark and one light. For these, combine a Clam Drop-Kick template with a Maki plastic. He adds that larger plastics with a little more bulk seem to do better.
“I fish these fish hard,” he says. “The water is dirty, so you really have to hit the jig and you have to get their attention and attract them aggressively.” While typical slow jigging produces some fish, he says moving the jig up and down in the water column aggressively really attracts the backwater fish.
LARGE ROUND WATERS
While the Midwest has plenty of great hardwater lakes, there’s something special about chasing slabs on gills and bellies off the Mississippi Channel. It’s a unique environment with different challenges and team requirements. But for those who master its eccentricities, like Griffith, it’s a great place to ice some incredibly large crappins.