Night best time for crappie fishing

HARRIS LAKE, N.C. – In the heat of summer, Shane Anderson doesn’t like to sweat his pursuit of crappie.

But he still likes to fill his cooler.

So crappie fishing for him is a night bite this time of year.

On a recent Friday night, the Arkansas native and Willow Springs, N.C., resident loaded a cooler with 63 keepers caught in his modified bass boat.

Anderson is a long-time crappie fisherman, but he took to night fishing only a couple of years ago.

“The biggest reason I got into it was to not get sunburned,” he said. “And you don’t have to contend with the ski boats and jet skis.”

Anderson, 37, already had taken his crappie fishing seriously, but switching to night fishing required further outfitting.

He and his crappie fishing buddies were already of the ilk that sink brush piles. They prefer constructing their own out of PVC piping, which they call “hurdles.”

“Christmas trees rot,” Anderson said. “And mostly you don’t get hung up.”

He has piles littered all over area lakes, the exact location of each one marked on his GPS unit.

“You don’t have a GPS with you?” he asked, not willing to give up any trade secrets. “I’d have to kill you if you gave up my coordinates.”

The sun was on its way down under the horizon, and with less than an hour of daylight left, Anderson started setting up for a night of fishing that would end after midnight. A handful of crappie had already been boated, caught on minnows under slip bobbers set about 10 to 15 feet down over 18 feet of water.

Anderson brought out a gas lantern and hung it from a weathered, 6-foot wooden pole standing next to the center console of his boat.

“This is redneck fishing,” he said.

Anderson, a truck driver, has lived in the Raleigh area for 20 years. He has a wife, Wendy, and two children – Clay, 6, and Courtney, 9. Often, he takes his kids and is smart enough not to take them when it’s 100 degrees.

He hasn’t shaken his own childhood pronunciation of crappie (which is pronounced with a “crop” in most of the Midwest and parts of the South; here it starts with “crap”).