Mason is expert with crappie | The Leaf Chronicle

Kentucky Lake fishing guide has knowledge of hot spots

By Owen Schroeder • The Leaf-Chronicle

Garry Mason is one of the top fishing guides on Kentucky Lake and he has learned a lot about catching crappie in his nearly 25 years of guiding on the big lake.I teamed up with a long-time friend to fish with Mason in the Big Sandy area of the lake recently and we were not disappointed. Mason is intimately familiar with that area of Kentucky Lake and he had us on fish just minutes after we left the boat ramp at Buchanan’s Resort.We began fishing stake beds that Mason had placed in 5-7 feet of water along creek channel dropoffs near the shoreline with small jigs tipped with plastic grubs.Mason strictly casts jigs to catch his crappie and he uses a rather unusual technique for his fishing. First, he spools 6-pound test fluorescent chartreuse monofilament line onto light action open face spinning outfits.”Fluorescent chartreuse is attractive to crappie and I believe that crappie can see the line and creep up on it until they see the grub and grab it,” he said. “The color of the line brings the fish closer to the lure.”I don’t know if I truly believe that, but we were catching some awfully big crappie and it is hard to argue with that kind of success.When I say big crappie, I mean big crappie. We did not catch a single fish under 10 inches all day and only a few under 12 inches. Most were 13- to 15-inch crappie with several over 16-inches and weighing more than two pounds. A 2-pound crappie on light action spinning equipment is about all the fishing action that anyone could ask for.Add to that white bass, yellow bass, bluegill and shellcrackers, and you have an exciting day of fishing.Second, Mason casts for his crappie much like bass anglers cast for bass. “Fishing with minnows and vertically fishing jigs requires that you pretty much have to fish directly over the structure,” he said. “If we had fished over the stake beds today, we would have bumped some of them with the boat or trolling motor and spooked the fish.”We were casting red 1/16-ounce Charlie Brewer, double light wire, round ball jig heads tipped with 2-inch Charlie Brewer Slider Grubs. We started off in cloudy morning conditions with clear grubs finished with silver sparkle and clear grubs finished with blue/silver/black sparkle. Once the clouds cleared and the sun came out, we changed colors to hot pink grubs with clear tails and white grubs with chartreuse tails. The white grubs where the best producers of the day.”When I’m fishing for crappie, I use dark colored grubs on dark days and bright colored grubs on bright days,” Mason said. “I also like the Charlie Brewer double light wire jig heads. If you get hung up, you can usually snap them out or you can pull them off as the light wire hook straightens out.”There is truth in what Mason said as we only had one hang-up all day that we couldn’t get out. In about seven hours of fishing using Mason’s fishing techniques, we put 40 slab crappie in the boat that dressed out to six big plastic freezer bags of boneless crappie fillets. Crappie fishing doesn’t get much better than that and you can bet that I will soon have 6-pound test fluorescent chartreuse monofilament line on all my crappie fishing rigs.For further information, Gregg Mason can be reached at 731-593-0171, or by email at grmason@bellsouth.net.

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