I have a lake about the same size as yours. The crappie recruitment swings are huge! Three years ago we caught very nice crappie averaging about 12inches with some being much larger but almost all of them were very nice sized. The average catch rate was about seven an hour. this year the average size fish is about nine inches and you catch one on every cast! I had a friend of mine fishing with me Friday and in less than two hours we had kept over fifty small crappie. We then went to a larger lake only a mile away on Saturday looking for bigger fish. This lake is about six hundred acres and is well known for a really good crappie population. We had the exact same thing happen! Lots of nine-inch crappie! I'm guessing that the crappie in the lake and the crappie in my pond were the same age? The biologist that manages the lake wants all the crappie taken out of it this year just like Bob Lusk has told me to do on mine. Why the swings in the large lake and my pond are so similar I don't know. Could it be weather related? We had low water levels followed by lots of rain? I'm just guessing The only good thing about all these small crappie is that it seems the bass are getting really fat eating them. This makes me wonder if now it will swing in favor of higher bass recruitment and an overpopulation of bass in the future?
