This fat pre-spawn crappie was taken by the author in Lake Greenwood. Photo courtesy of Bennett Kirkpatrick.

Some while ago, a close friend of mine from Winnsboro brought a game warden with him to fish for crappie one day on Lake Wylie. I had just put in my fall brushpiles the week before and they were full of fish.

The weather was quite warm for that time of year and we were still fishing with small minnows. We motored over to a long sandbar on Big Allison Creek, and seined up our minnows for the day. Minnows about the length of a matchstick were thick as the hair on a dog's back there; in two dips, we had enough to fish with.

It wasn't very far to one of my new brushpiles and we were fishing within minutes. After putting out anchors fore and aft, I described the perimeters of the brush to my guests. The water was 20 feet deep there with the top of the brush just 12 feet below the surface. With 8-pound-test line weighted with a split shot about the size of an English pea, the bait will fall through the water column about a foot per second. After telling the group to start off with a 10 count, we all cast beyond the brush. After a count of 10, we started to reel slowly in an even cadence.

All three of us each caught a nice crappie on our first cast. In the ensuing half hour, we boated around two dozen fat crappie. We only fished four brushpiles that fall morning before we limited out with 90 crappie. The game warden fishing with us that morning made a statement that I will never forget. "I didn't know that you could legally catch crappie like that with a hook and line," he said.

Well, obviously you can. In fact, across South Carolina, you can find places to put limits of decent crappie in your boat. We talked with fisheries biologists and other experts for each region of the state to see what they had to say about crappie populations. Here's the outlook for the year in South Carolina.

REGION 1
The major lakes in Region 1 are the Savannah, Jocassee, Keowee, Clarks Hill, Russell, Hartwell, Greenwood and Lake Secession.

I talked with Officer Gene Hayes, fisheries biologist for the SCDNR, and asked him how he would rate these lakes for crappie fishing potential and prospects. Some of the best lakes are Lake Greenwood, Clarks Hill, Lake Hartwell and Lake Russell. Officer Hayes' favorite lake for crappie is Greenwood. There are several reasons for this. The growth rate and the catch rate are high, and when both of these quality indicators are high, you have a good crappie fishery on your hands.

Additionally, Hayes fishes Greenwood for much the same reason that many anglers fish their favorite crappie lakes: It's close to home. (In this case, Hayes lives 10 miles from Greenwood.)

Officer Hayes' favorite lures are mini-jigs in the 1/16- and 1/32-ounce sizes. The most popular colors are chartreuse, white, blue and red according to water conditions.