My brother and I have fished several times at a place called Flag Lake, located on Barksdale Air Force Base. We have caught nice black crappie. There are many cypress trees on the lake but no bottom structure, per se. The entire lake is no more than 6 feet deep. There is a great deal of salvinia that moves back and forth across the lake. Sometimes the salvinia is as far as the eye can see. But then, the next day it's just on the shore line. When we catch a crappie you won't catch another in that same location. They are not "stacked up" anywhere. We just have to move from tree to tree, covering hundreds of square feet before catching another one.

Are we missing something about consistently catching crappie? Any suggestions on different structure to look for?

You definitely aren't missing anything. With that much cover it just spreads the fish out and there really isn't anything you can do other than just dip and go and pick off a fish here and there. If the Salvinia was gone, then it would make it a lot easier to stack them up.

If your willing to do a little work.

You could take a couple of cinder blocks with 2 holes. Tie them together with nylon rope. Add 10' pieces of bamboo to each side, one piece at a time until they lock up and drop it in the deepest part you can locate.

GPS the offshore location.

Shad will migrate to the bamboo & over time the crappie will find the Shad.

Pretty standard for shallow crappie. The shallow water prevents them from stacking up like large reservoir crappie.

In shallow water I always cover ground. Jig and bobber is killer year round for shallow water fish in shallow lakes and ponds.

Shade, max shade, darkest shade! I fish a roughly 50 acre pond for crappie and most of it is less than 4 feet. They gather in the shade in the day, sometimes in 1ft, and then venture out at night to feed. Drop jigs into the caverns under the cypress trees if they have space under the roots, slip snagless jigs under the weed mats in the thickest places, and FISH THE DEEPEST EDGES OF THE WEEDS FIRST LIGHT AND LAST LIGHT!!!!!!! Key feeding area right there.

Eric

There's no crappie there!! Fish for white perch instead!!

Try the tree line out from the road across the spillway and any cover you can find along the spillway road. They were there 20yrs ago unless the gators ate em all!!! I'm not going back out there! First time I've ridden in the back of a MP car and had machine guns pointed at me!! Couple high school kids fishing gave the entire military police force a reason to dust off all their toys!!

The colonel was pissed!!!

Crappie like to hide in shade. They are pursuing the salvinia and because the salvinia is moving, you can't fish at the same place. But I think you can try under the cypress tree. Hope this can help a little.