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‘Designer’ colors in crappie jigs are scoring on Conway |
 CONWAY
– Recent successes on late winter crappie in Lake Conway by veteran
anglers have raised an old – and unanswerable – question.What is the best color in jigs to use on crappie? Lately it’s been red body, chartreuse head, said veteran crappie worker Ruben Goss of Conway. “We have been catching some nice, real nice, crappie up in this one cove on red jigs with green or chartreuse heads,” he said. In Lake Conway’s early days, a virtual axiom from crappie anglers was “use any color jig as long as it’s white or chartreuse.” Then yellow came into popular use, or maybe yellow was in the mix all along, just not as prominent as white and chartreuse. Somewhere along the line, they started painted the heads of jigs various colors instead of the familiar lead or silver tones. One time, a red-head jig with a chartreuse skirt brought in the crappie. Next time, it might be a black-head jig with a white skirt. White-head jigs with chartreuse skirts could catch crappie some days, but a chartreuse-head jig with white skirt would work the next time out. Today, there are more jig types and color combinations than you can shake a stick at. Blue and green skirts on crappie jigs have worked – at times – on Lake Conway for some years. Pink is popular – sometimes. Curly-tailed jigs are favored sometimes over straight tail models. An old technique that continues to produce, at times, is a jig tipped with a minnow. But what type and color of jig is the most productive? We’ve got hair jigs, chicken feather jigs, plastic jigs, tube jigs, mylar jigs. The size of the jig is another factor, also. Quarter-ounce jigs sometimes are too big for crappie, so anglers go to one-eighth-ounce jigs. Then somebody switches to 1/16-ounce and catches a boatload. Next time around, it’s 1/32-ounce that’s working. Once in a while, somebody uses a 1/64-ounce jig on crappie, but these are more commonly worked for trout. Some crappie specialists make use of model airplane paints from a hobby store to color the heads of bare, meaning unpainted or homemade, lead jigs. Do the crappie really know the difference in all this? Crappie fishermen think they do. |
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