Releasing Crappie

[Chrisper4694]

First off keep as many damn legal crappie as you want, that's not what this is about haha.

I don't know if anyone else has ever noticed this but when you catch a crappie (and it doesn't even have to be from water that deep) sometimes their jaw sort of locks open and they just lay on the surface and won't move or swim or twitch a bit and then float back up.

Sometimes after a few minutes they swim away, but most of the time they just float there and die or a bird comes and kills them.

I've never looked into this and it seems pretty stupid, but anyway, this weird trick works almost every time and i've probably avoided killing upwards of 200 crappie that i released over the past few years:

when you go to release the crappie, manually close their mouth by making a little 'O' with your thumb and pointer finger and just stick their tip in there (insert penis joke). hold their tail and just drop them nose first into the water (if the water isn't too cold for your baby hands, put them all the way in and kind of push them down).

Don't ask me why but it revives them immediately almost every time. The key is to propel them into the water with their mouth closed.

I know most guys probably don't care about crappie, but that's probably because they don't know how to target the really huge ones with ultralight gear...I target pretty much every fresh and saltwater species we have in NJ and spring crappie slab hunting is still one of my favorite times hands down!

There will be a lot of crappie caught as by-catch so please consider not just killing them all for no reason, make sure they either swim away or make it to your dinner plate ; we don't need to feed the stupid seagulls!

p.s. if you want to release the 13"+ ones, i'm with you; to me, they're worth more in the water anyway...a couple of 10-11 inchers make a great meal though