Jeff Smith is a veteran angler who prefers to target walleyes on the northeast Georgia lakes he regularly fishes near his home in Cleveland, Georgia. But early in the morning of Nov. 5, Smith was fishing alone and looking for crappies on a 240-acre Rabun County reservoir named Lake Seed.
“There’s a flooded treetop where I’ve sometimes caught some big crappies and I went to that spot to see if they were around,” Smith told Wired2fish. “It’s hit or miss – they’re there, or not. I found the spot years ago while trolling and snagged the deep tree in clear water.
“I saw it on my depthfinder, and started fishing it occasionally, and at times there are some huge black crappies there. But the lake doesn’t have an overabundance of fish, and you gotta hunt ‘em to get ‘em.”
That morning was one of the good times. Smith quickly started catching hefty black crappies using a tiny 1/16-ounce soft plastic jig tipped with a live minnow. He tried different colors to keep the fish biting, and before long he had nine crappies in his boat – all slabs.
“They sometimes tried to get me into the treetop, and I can lose some in the limbs,” said the retired gunsmith and Vietnam veteran. “But my 6-foot Duckett spinning rod and 4-pound mono line held up well.”
All nine of the black crappies Smith caught that morning were big, well over one pound each. He picked out the fish he thought was the largest, and he took it to Georgia’s nearby Lake Burton Fish Hatchery. On state certified scales Smith’s 16.6-inch long black crappie was weighed by Burton Fish Hatchery’s James Miles at 2 pounds, 2 ounces.
It’s a lake record black crappie for Smith, who already holds the lake record bluegill that weighed over one pound. Smith regularly fishes several of the small power plant reservoirs in the area on the Tallulah River, and he’s caught some record fish from them too.
“I had the Lake Rabun record yellow perch for a while, but my record recently got beat,” he said. “I’ll catch another big perch there [soon] and maybe beat that record too.”
