We’ve been blessed with an early melt this season in the Kawartha Lakes; and April has been a month full of guiding trips for spring crappies. With several cold fronts that have come through this month the water temps on most bodies of water in the Kawartha Lakes have been hovering right around 50 degrees which is perfect for the local spring panfish bite. On bright sunny days the crappies have been pushed up super shallow and spawning in whatever shallow weed growth they can find. On the cooler, more overcast days, they’ve been retreating from the shallows and staging just outside these spawning grounds in 5-7 feet of water. Locating the crappies is the difficult part. Once you find an area they are using, you rarely have to move very far and can potentially catch fish on a single spot all day long. This spring we’ve been catching great quantities of crappies as well as several trophy sized fish over 13″. Working small plastics rigged on float set-ups over the weeds the crappies have been using has been the technique of choice this season.