Speck fishing is easy. Sometimes.

You know the deal; black crappies—“speckled perch” to most Floridians—are about as smart as dodo birds, but fortunately they’re a lot more abundant. Stick a minnow in their face, set the hook and start heating up the fry-pan.

Unfortunately, it’s not always that easy, particularly in the winter months, just before the major migration to shoreline cover to spawn, typically in February and March.

The fish are out there somewhere, but finding them can take a bit of work, as well as some electronic help. Basically, the search starts with running the deeper waters of any given lake; the fish usually hang near large schools of shad, which are easily spotted on a depthfinder. You can run cross-hatch patterns across the lake at speed until you mark a couple of baitfish schools, then go back to them and start trolling in that area. They’ll typically hang in eight to 25 feet of water at this time of year—shallower in tannin lakes, deeper in clear. Some guys toss a couple of marker buoys to help them map out a trolling route, or if you have a chartplotter, you can simply turn on the tracking function and let that map your trolling course, with waypoints punched in where you’ve spotted baitfish.

The winner of a national championship crappie fishoff this year used a Blakemore Roadrunner with a minnow attached, and a red hook suspended above it with a second minnow. The Roadrunner is a little horse-head jig with a tiny spinner attached below the head. Lots of other jigs and spinners work well, including the Beetle Spin, Hal Fly, Blue Fox, Crappiebuster, Crappie Magic, Crappie Pro, et cetera.

Does the red hook make any difference? Hard to say, but enough people who fish for money believe in them that they’re probably worth a try. Some new models of hooks are made to stand out horizontally from the main line, which acts as sort of a mini-spreader and may help the bite.

John Evertsen of Orlando, a well-known crappie guide, likes these hooks and sometimes uses a couple of them above a weight or a spinner-jig in deep, clear lakes like Conway.

The big difference in jigs is the weight. If you’re fishing 14 feet of water on a day with 15-mph winds, it may take a 1⁄ 4-ounce head to keep the lure down within a couple feet of bottom where the fish are likely to be biting. On a calm day, on the other hand, you’ll catch more fish with a smaller head, down to 1⁄ 64 ounce. Take a selection to match whatever conditions you may face.

Colors are another factor that seems to have an impact on the catch rate. I have had it proven to me, repeatedly, that some color combos work better than others, and that the effective combo varies from lake to lake. It seems illogical, but the fish actually do sometimes want a yellow head, green body, yellow tail feather combo in Lake Crescent, for example, while on Lake George, just a few miles up the St. Johns, they might prefer a red head with gray body and gray tail feather. Considering that jigs don’t really look like minnows, whatever the color, it’s weird that the fish have a color preference, but at times they definitely do.

Whatever the lure choice, you won’t catch nearly as many specks on 20-pound-test as you will on six, and you’ll catch even more fish on four. I suspect the lure sinks deeper on the lighter, thinner lines, so it stays in the strike zone better. The visibility of the line could be a factor, too, as could the flex of thinner mono, giving a better action to the jig. Of course, when that rogue 5-pound largemouth grabs the jig, you will have your hands full with 4-pound-test, but that’s one of life’s more pleasant surprises. A careful hand with four will whip any speck that ever lived.

Speaking of which, they don’t call ’em papermouths for nothing. Actually, I have never heard anybody call ’em that, anyway, except outdoors writers, but it’s not a bad name because the skin around their mouths is a membrane so thin that you can see through it. Naturally, it tears easily if you try to derrick a heavy fish aboard, so a landing net is an essential part of fishing for specks of a pound and up—and you’ll find plenty of them in open water on some lakes.