Day 2: Why Fish Bridge Pilings for Crappie with Kennieth Pierce

Editor’s Note: Thirty-five year-old Kennieth Pierce of Quinlan, Texas, fishes Lake Arlington in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex as his home lake. Pearce’s daddy started him crappie fishing when he was 5-years old.

I don’t start fishing as soon as I come to a bridge piling. I’ll scan it first with my electronics to see if any crappie are on the bridge piling, where they’re positioned, and what depth they’re holding. Then I circle back around, shut down my big engine and use my trolling motor to get right on top of the school. I’ve learned that most of the time the crappie will be holding really tight to the column, so I want to get my jig right beside the concrete. If I see the crappie are holding at 14 feet on the bridge column, I’ll use my trolling motor to swim my jig all the way around the column at that depth. If I don’t get a bite, I’ll lower the jig down another foot, so my jig is swimming a foot above the crappie. Once I get a bite and know at what depth the crappie are holding, then I’ll swim my jigs around all the columns at that same depth. I like to fish the middle columns first, especially when the sun is high in the sky, because the water around those middle columns generally will provide the most shade. As the day goes on, I always try to concentrate most of my fishing on the shady side of each column that I’m fishing. I often locate my crappie in 12 to 20 feet when I’m fishing bridge columns. Of course, that depends on the time of the year I’m fishing and the water conditions. For jig heads, I like the crappie jigheads that I get from Limits Tackle (https://www.facebook.com/LimitsTackle/).

Lake Arlington where I guide and fish is located in the middle of the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex. Although there is a power plant on the lake, it’s not used very often. When I was a youngster, the power plant would run all winter long, but today, the power plant isn’t operated very often during the winter. This makes wintertime crappie more difficult to find, because there’s no current coming through the lake. The power plant runs more during the spring and summer months when the demand for power increases. One of the problems when there is current running in the spring and summer is that the water coming out of the turbines is pretty hot, so I want to get as far away from the power plant as I can during that time of the year. Texas is hot anyway. But when you add the hot water coming out of the power plant to the water that is already warm, I spend most of time down near the dam fishing for crappie during the spring and summer.

To see how and where Kenneth Pearce fishes, go to his YouTube channel at hookcitytv

(https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdcuACQzEadZ-ihtqH28uOQ), and watch some of his videos. Most of his videos are crappie fishing, but he has several videos on bluegill fishing too.