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Tony “Big T” Sheppard is a competitive crappie angler and crappie lure designer that shares some great tips on targeting crappie as they transition from spring to summer. In this video, he talks power trolling, subtle presentations, and vertical jigging while using your electronics to pinpoint crappie. As well as casting lighter jigs to shallower crappie you see on the screen to avoid spooking fish. He also plays around with colors and explains why he uses a bigger jig than a lot of other anglers with his power trolling technique.
He talks crappie behavior as well around the spawn and post spawn when moving out on deeper cover as the water warms up and stabilizes going into the summer.
Some good discussion on his favorite jig setup which is a 1/4 ounce Jenko Big T Slasher jighead with a Jenko Big T Mermaid tail on 14-foot Jenko Slab City rods and 8-pound hi-vis line and Daiwa CR80 reels.
He uses his Humminbird units to find brush, stake beds and stumps, and then uses a combination of his waypoints and 360 imaging to get on milk runs of cover on these deeper flats coming out of spawning bays. Then uses Garmin Panoptix units to pinpoint the fish around the cover as well as make sure his jig stays in the strike zone longer.
Currently working as Senior Advisor to Wired2fish. Former COO and Publisher, Jason Sealock came to Wired2fish shortly after inception in January of 2010. Prior to that he was the Editor-in-Chief of FLW Outdoors Magazines. He worked up from Associate Editor to Photo Editor and finally Editor in Chief of three magazines FLW Bass, FLW Walleye and FLW Saltwater. He set the content direction for Wired2fish while also working directly with programmers, consultants and industry partners.
Sealock has been an avid angler for the better part of 40 years and has been writing and shooting fishing and outdoors content for more than 25 years. He is an expert with fishing electronics and technologies and an accomplished angler, photographer, writer and editor. He has taught a lot of people to find fish with their electronics and has been instrumental in teaching these technologies to the masses. He's also the industry authority on new fishing tackle and has personally reviewed more than 10,000 products in his tenure.
He has a 30-year background in information technologies and was a certified engineer for a time in Microsoft, Novell, Cisco, and HP.
He mostly fishes for bass and panfish around the house. He has, however, caught fish in 42 of the 50 states in the US as well as Costa Rica, Mexico, and Canada and hopes to soon add Finland, Japan, Africa and Australia to his list.
