This time of year crappie can have short feeding periods. One of the reasons for this is that large schools of bait fish start holding to structure/cover, So the crappie can fill up fairly fast. Its not uncommon at all to stop on a brush pile that is loaded with crappie and not catch many because they are not feeding. This time of year i use a 15 minute rule, If i don't get the fish feeding in 15 minutes i leave and go to another location in search of feeding fish. I will many times go back to areas that i did not catch many fish and hit them feeding and do well. If you mainly use jigs sometimes it helps to tip your jig with a minnow to get them started and then catch them good with only the jig or a jig with nibblet. If your catching crappie good and they just stop you can keep fishing that area but it may be a while before they turn back on. In cases like this i once again will normally leave and maybe return to that spot later to catch them feeding again.
Good luck this summer with your crappie fishing, Hope to see you on the water.

Cliff

Great tip Cliff!

When I was Hybrid fishing on humps in the past - the hybrids would turn on about every 2 hrs for about 15 to 20 minutes. The humps would be covered up with fish an then gone. Maybe they chased the bait off and followed them or got spooked from the boat action above.

I hope I don't get kicked off the crappie section talking about H_b__ds.

Red

Thanks for the tips Cliff. I have been wondering why the fish seem to really break loose in spurts. What I normally find is that I can elicit a feeding response from x number of fish on each pile I pull up to but once the bite is over, usually after 15 minutes or so, its time to move on. After reading this, I think I may loop back to some of the piles later in the day to catch another group feeding.

I am relatively new to crappie fishing and this post is just the sort of thing that is very helpful Thanks very much!

Timing is everything.

Thanks Cliff.
That's info worth sharing......
Jigum

I have a brush pile that holds a decent amount of fish and was wondering do crappie group up by size? Some days I will go and catch nice keepers, then another day I will catch nothing but dinks. Or do the bigger fish just feed at certain times and the small fish are really aggressive all the time? Im still in the learning process..any input would help.

Crappie travel more than most people realize. I truely believe that crappie travel in schools from the time they are fry. That is why that a lot of the time you catch many fish all the same size most of the time in one area. I will move to another area if we are catching a lot of small fish and find an area that has a bigger size school at it. If you are fishing the next day at that lake go ahead and hit that same pile that had small fish because they could be moved on and a larger size school could have moved in. I have even seen it happen the same day.

one of the main places i fish is a huge brushpile I made and put underneath a dock in a marina. It is in about 15 ft of water. This is the place where I have been catching the dinks lately. Do bigger crappie tend to school up more on the main part of a lake? or will they still move in and out of marinas and docks?

YOur bigger fish may have moved out a little deeper.

I am pretty sure that fish of similar size are usually together. I remember getting into them during the spawn on Lake Athens and catching nothing under 11 inches. Several days in a row.

During the winter, Lakes like Fork have a "keep all you catch, no culling" rule. TPWD suggests that if you are catching small crappie, move until you find the bigger ones. To me that means that crappie do school with ones of similar size.