I haven’t fished for crappie in Texas in years. I always catch a bunch in late summer in Minnesota but I’ve turned to sandies and hybrids almost exclusively here. I used to catch a bunch of crappie in the spring years ago on private lakes off of brush piles and in winter in boat houses but I’ve never caught them in early spring in the really shallow water on these big lakes. While fishing the rip rap off the dam at Tawakoni yesterday, I was marking a lot of fish in 5-7’ of water. They weren’t shad - they had a very bright/yellow return, not orange “balls” like shad. They weren’t sandies because I couldn’t get them to hit anything. I did throw a 1/16 oz Roadrunner to see if they might have been crappie. But I didn’t have anything smaller or any bobbers to really focus on the crappie. I was having to swim it back pretty quickly. After reading some of these posts, I’m wondering if I should go back there and focus on the crappie. I usually don’t trust my graph in water that shallow, but these marks looked exactly like sandies and hybrids look. What do you guys think? Am I crazy?

Crappie will certainly hit a roadrunner. So don't know what you saw.

I don't know the real name but could have been what we called bar fish. Caught a ton there where you were while crappie fishing. Son kept feeding them to a crane who I thought was going to follow us home

It’s my The problem was that I couldn’t fish the RR slowly with the shallow water and a 6’6” spinning rod. The hybrid bite has been really slow so I’ll try to focus more on the crappie this weekend.

Get on top of them and dead stick it. If they are crappie one of them will smoke it.

Bar fish are yellow bass, I think. If that’s what they were, they would have torn up my tail spinner and RR.

I’m going to try deadsticking them with crappie jigs and see how that goes.