Thursday, December 11, 2008
The fish doctor's prescription for catching crappie
Bill Cochran
Recent columns
Keith Wray
If you consider crappie fishing just a springtime affair, then you don’t know Keith Wray. Last January, the Kerr Lake angler caught 1,800 crappie.
Known affectionately on a number of angling Web sites as FishDoc, Wray’s name frequently turns up on the leader board of crappie tournaments, including the recent Crappie USA event on Smith Mountain Lake.
I asked Wray, who lives in Eden, N.C., the following questions about himself and about crappie fishing:
Q. How many days out of the year do you fish for crappie?
A. I fish 250 days a year, about half are for crappie.
Q. How did you get the handle “FishDoc?”
A. I got the name from a couple of fishing buddies about 30-years ago. They started calling me “the fish doctor” because I could figure out how to catch fish when nobody else could. When I started posting fishing messages on the Internet, I just shortened it to Fishdoc. My Web site is fishdocsguideservice.com.
Q. What is your most productive time of the year to catch large crappie?
A. I catch big crappie all year, but catch more in the late fall and early spring.
Q. How about in the winter? Do you look for any particularly kind of day to go fishing?
A. The best days in the winter are after a two- or three-day warming trend.
Q. What was the worst weather you ever fished in?
A. It was during a club tournament year before last. The temperature never got over 30 degrees and the wind blew 15- to 20-mph. and it rained, sleeted and snowed.
Q. How did you do?
A. We won.
Q. In what way do your winter techniques differ from your spring techniques?
A. In the spring, we cast and retrieve jigs, but in the winter many times you must get right over the fish and work the jig vertically or try to hold very still.
Q. Do your prefer minnows or artificial lures?
A. I fish jigs 90 percent of the time. I use minnows on my jigs in the late winter and early spring while tite-lining.*
Q. What are some favorite jig brands?
Q. I tie my own bucktail jigs and have been having really good luck on the Bobby Garland Baby Shad.
Q. Kerr is the king of crappie lakes in Virginia. What makes it so special?
A. The forage base and the size of the lake. I’ve fished it hard for 30-plus years and you can’t fish it out or even hurt it.
Q. Crappie tournaments have become popular in recent years. What kind of future do you see for them?
A. I think tournaments will become better as they attract more sponsors and participants.
Q. What was your biggest tournament win?
A. My biggest win was at the Crappie USA tournament held recently on Smith Mountain Lake, but I have won just as much money at local tournaments at Kerr. My most significant accomplishment was coming in second in the yearly point race. I fished by myself against 15 or 20 two-man teams that used 16 rods per boat. I cast with one rod only.
Q. What was the winning technique you used at the Smith Mountain Lake tournament?
A. Casting jigs to laydowns and brush piles. We usually do best shooting docks* there, but the day of the tournament was cloud and raining. The fish weren’t around docks.
Q. There are miles of shoreline and tons of cover at Kerr. How do you determine where to fish?
A. I rely on my many years of experience of fishing all seasons and in all kind of weather. I try to spend an hour each trip looking for new places. I have over 400 marked on a map.
Q. What are the key factors that make a successful crappie fisherman?
A. Skill and knowledge.
Q. Tell us something about the boat you use.
A. I use a 17-foot, V-hull Alumacraft with a 60-hp Yamaha tiller steer. The boat has three swivel seats, a Motor Guide electric trolling motor with variable speed and depth finders front and rear. It is easy to control when casting, easy to anchor and great for trolling.
Q. What kind of crappie fishing season do you predict for Kerr next year?
A. I predict another great year for crappie.
Q. Recently you got into the fishing guide business. What was behind that?
A. My wife is what’s behind my starting a crappie guiding business. She said I was being foolish not to charge for all the information I was giving away for free.
*SHOOTING DOCKS is using a very short rod to flip a lure or bait underhandedly beneath a dock.
*TITE-LINING is using 12- to 16-foot rods off the front of the boat often in shallow water while trolling just fast enough to make forward progress while keeping the lines as close to vertical as possible. Popular lures are jigs with plastic bodies, marabou tails with hooks tipped with a minnow.
