Maybe your lake is mostly too shallow for good crappie recruitment?
There is lots of discussion about crappie preferring "open water" during portions of their life cycle. I always think of that as the deep water away from shoreline cover.
I have never considered the actual water depth as a critical variable.
Have you read up on the threads where people have good crappie production in their ponds? What was their maximum depth? What was the depth of most of the pond basin?
(I don't know the answers, but I certainly don't remember that variable being discussed in the crappie threads I read in the past. Don't know if that is the fault of my memory, or if it was not discussed much?)
